THEY’RE BRAINWASHING YOU! (& other secrets that made you click) - Etymology Nerd

Chris Williamson 0:00 Six seven was voted word of the year in 2025 from dictionary.com. Is that cheating? Not even a word. Doesn't mean anything.

Adam Aleksic 0:08 Well, you have to understand that whenever a dictionary chooses their word of the year, that's a marketing ploy by big dictionary to sell more dictionaries.

Chris Williamson 0:15 [laughs] Yes.

Adam Aleksic 0:22 Six seven, of course, is this reference where if you say it, you can go viral. That's the idea behind six seven. That's the whole joke, that this is a possibility of getting clipped, that you can cash in on the virality of it for your own gain, and dictionary.com played that game. But every single person who did it also cashed in on that. There was a Connecticut House Representative, Bill Buckbee, who said six seven on the Connecticut's, uh, state floor. And all these people are doing the exact same thing as Taelon Kinney, who is the, um, basketball player who started the trend, and all the Gen Alpha kids who are cashing in on it, like the six seven kid. All of it was a ploy for virality, and it is a realization that clip farming is the future of distribution online.

Chris Williamson 1:01 Wow, okay. But it's a word that doesn't mean anything, and is specifically designed to be vacuous and to incite the question, "What does that mean?" Is that, is that unique?

Adam Aleksic 1:13 I don't believe that it doesn't mean anything.

Chris Williamson 1:15 Right.

Adam Aleksic 1:15 I believe even when something is absurd, absurdity is a meaning, and it's absurd for a reason. It's absurd because it's sort of critiquing the general information ecosystem. It's absurd that this would emerge as a word, but that is the meaning. The absurdity of the word is its own definition.

Chris Williamson 1:28 Ah, okay. So it's a story about... It's, it's a meta word in a way.

Adam Aleksic 1:31 Yeah, exactly.

Chris Williamson 1:32 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 1:32 It's, it's all a... It's a knowing wink.

Chris Williamson 1:34 Okay.

Adam Aleksic 1:34 By uttering six seven, you're playing into the panopticon.

Chris Williamson 1:37 Rage bait was Oxford's 2025 word of the year.

Adam Aleksic 1:41 Right. [laughs] They're also... They were rage baiting with that. They, they're hoping that it sparks controversy. Now when people are commenting about the word rage bait being chosen as the word of the year, that drives the word further on Twitter or whatever, X, excuse me, and, uh, and as a result, more people know about Oxford Dictionaries. You gotta remember, this is big dictionary at work.

Chris Williamson 1:58 And slop was another one as well. So a word describing... A, a word that is sloppy describing something that is sloppy being used for people to complain about the fact that, "Look at the state of language today. It's all... Well, it's slop, actually."

Adam Aleksic 2:13 Yeah, I, I like to combat that idea that language is slop or brain rot. Um, there's nothing inherently in a word that's good or bad. It's a tool that you can use. But I think we cast our negative associations of social media onto the language. And, uh, yeah, of course, a lot of the videos we see are slop, but that doesn't mean the words themselves are bad for your brain.

Chris Williamson 2:31 Do you think... Is TikTok becoming the most powerful linguistic engine on Earth at the moment? Is that what's shaping language more than anything else?

Adam Aleksic 2:39 Absolutely. There was a study by Know Your Meme in 2022 that found where words come from over time by percentage of platforms, and it started out mostly on 4chan, and Reddit, and Twitter, and now it's mostly TikTok and Twitter. Um, and again, sorry, X. And, uh, you see a-

Chris Williamson 2:57 It's fine.

Adam Aleksic 2:57 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 2:57 It's still Twitter.

Adam Aleksic 2:59 I know.

Chris Williamson 2:59 It's still Twitter.

Adam Aleksic 3:00 I'm, I'm holding onto it.

Chris Williamson 3:02 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 3:02 Um, yeah, no, but a lot of stuff is happening on TikTok. There's linguistic innovation. There's a, a kind of... Everything comes from the user interface. There's a feeling of a conversation happening there.

Chris Williamson 3:11 Mm-hmm.

Adam Aleksic 3:11 Users come there for the conversation, to chip in, to be part of this effervescent thing that's going on, and in that, language is created. Along with this, we have all these echo chambers and algorithmic trends being perpetuated that push modern slang cycles faster than ever before.

Chris Williamson 3:25 Mm.

Chris Williamson 3:27 Is there such a thing as a Twitter dialect versus a LinkedIn dialect versus a Reddit or a live stream dialect? Are these almost individual, um, variants on language in each of these different cohorts?

Adam Aleksic 3:43 Absolutely. It's the same way when you're in your grandmother's house versus when you're in a frat house. You have a different expectation of how to speak. You're not gonna speak to your grandmother the way you would to a frat brother. There's, like, a normal way of communicating. So a platform functions kind of like a house. It is a place where you go to use a certain type of language. So on LinkedIn, you're gonna use this more professional language. On Twitter, you're going to engage in more linguistic play where you're, uh, you'll have all these words like jester, gooning, or whatever emerge. Uh, on T- on TikTok, there might be more fandom language or something. But also, I don't wanna speak broadly about individual platforms. Even within these platforms, there are micro dialects going on. There's K-pop groups and Swiftie groups, and, uh, they all speak kind of their own language.

Chris Williamson 4:20 Hmm. What did you make of the fall... I think one of the most viral instances of linguistic exposure was that mid, uh, jester maxing at the club when the foids come over, is it better to be mogging with the bros than... What did you make of that fallout?

Adam Aleksic 4:40 Yeah. I think it's kinda doing the same thing as six seven, where there's a meaning beyond what the literal meaning technically is. It's kind of a knowing wink again to the algorithm that by saying these words, you can go viral. You can cash in on Clavicular's fame. He is the human six seven.

Chris Williamson 4:54 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 4:54 Um, and-

Chris Williamson 4:55 [laughs]

Adam Aleksic 4:58 If you talk about him, you get to go viral. That's, that's kind of the thing. But in doing so, you can also push the trend further. And while six seven was innocuous, maybe Clavicular is more harmful. Um, but that, that is kind of the name of the game of virality, that all these things are just keywords, maxing, gooning, whatever. And you can just say that, and you can go viral because the keywords are what pushes things through the algorithm, and they're what people resonate with on the personal level when they're scrolling.

Chris Williamson 5:20 It also tells you something about the person using them. It's, uh, an identifier-

Adam Aleksic 5:25 Yes

Chris Williamson 5:25 ... of in-group, uh, uh, belonging.

Adam Aleksic 5:28 100%. Language is a tool of identity, and when you use a word, you are signaling that you're a part of this cohort.

Chris Williamson 5:34 Mm. What are the most defining characteristics of influencers speaking online for creators? What, what, wh- uh, how, how do you think about the constituent components of that?

Adam Aleksic 5:46 Yeah. Um, I've spent a lot of time working on the influencer accent. I used to consult on a court case where one influencer was suing another influencer for stealing her vibe, and part of that was the accent. Um, but you know-

Chris Williamson 5:55 Hang on, hang on, hang on.

Adam Aleksic 5:57 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 5:58 Hang on. Pause. What?

Adam Aleksic 6:00 It was here in Austin, actually. Um, but there was one is called the sad beige lawsuit that there was this minimalist influencer kind of wore a lot of brown clothing and there was another minimalist influencer also in Austin who wore a lot of brown clothing and they kind of spoke the same. And so one of them sued the other for, for stealing their IP. Um, but you can-

Chris Williamson 6:18 Which included the accent

Adam Aleksic 6:21 ... the accent. Exactly. So I was brought on as a consultant in that case. And, um, the takeaway is that neither of them were really original and that they pay homage to an older tradition of influencers talking.

Chris Williamson 6:30 It's a long and illustrious history of influencers speaking in this way.

Adam Aleksic 6:34 Absolutely. I mean, I think the modern like the, "Hey guys, welcome to my podcast," that kind of like, that's a, the lifestyle influencer accent, um, that traces all the way back to like Kim K and the Paris Hilton and early beauty YouTubers and then that kind of filtered into TikTok and that same voice with the uptalk and the vocal fry is preserved because there's this thing called the linguistic founder effect where you kind of follow in the footsteps of people who came before you linguistically and that's why also platforms do have different commenting cultures and different linguistic cultures.

Chris Williamson 7:03 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 7:03 Um, and that's only one type of influencer accent. I obviously speak-

Chris Williamson 7:06 Pause on that one.

Adam Aleksic 7:06 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 7:07 What, what are they trying to achieve with the lifestyle influencer accent? What are the important parts and what's the outcome they're trying to get toward?

Adam Aleksic 7:14 Yeah, great question. There's a few things going on. One of it is just social signaling. It's saying, "I'm part of your group," because that's what all of language does. So there is a identity marker of what it's like to be an influencer and so you're performing this idea of an influencer also performing relatability to the young women who are watching you. At the same time, the accent is optimized for the algorithm. There's an element of retention which is how long you watch the video and when you drag out words it kind of works better for captivating your audience. Um, dead silence is very bad on the algorithm so if you have a live stream or something you want to drag out your final syllable so actually that uptalk where you kind of lengthen your final vowel is very good for online hooking.

Chris Williamson 7:52 No way. So if you don't have your next sentence cued up you can have a holding pattern which is the end of the last word so that you know what you're gonna say at the end and then after that you can work out what's coming next?

Adam Aleksic 8:04 That's exactly it. In linguistics this is-

Chris Williamson 8:05 Holy fuck!

Adam Aleksic 8:06 Yeah. It's called floor holding. It's an actual like strategy that people use before, uh, you know social media.

Chris Williamson 8:12 In debate.

Adam Aleksic 8:12 If you were on a stage, if you're on a debate you want to keep grabbing people's attention so use things like filler words actually, um, is a great example of a floor holding tactic where you are trying to get people to keep listening to you even though you don't have something immediately to say.

Chris Williamson 8:25 Alex O'Connor taught me this great one about Christopher Hitchens that if he was in the middle of a debate and he needed to take a sip of water or have a thought he would get halfway through the sentence and then would continue from there and I thought that's so fucking cool as opposed to pausing at the end and then thinking about what he was gonna say by taking or even as... So you might say why is that the case? Well...

Adam Aleksic 8:52 Yeah. That's good.

Chris Williamson 8:52 Really what we need to consider is... Oh, oh, oh, I'm waiting. So the use of silence-

Adam Aleksic 8:58 We want to know what comes next.

Chris Williamson 8:59 Bingo.

Adam Aleksic 8:59 Yeah. And same with the influencers. It's like if, if there's an uptalk there's an implied I'm not done speaking and that's kind of the meta signal that there's something more to come. It sounds like something's unfinished when there's uptalk and when there's downtalk you'll never hear down like I'm done. Like that's like a falling tone.

Chris Williamson 9:15 Oh, it's a handoff. There you go.

Adam Aleksic 9:16 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 9:17 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 9:17 So you will not hear that online at all because it's-

Chris Williamson 9:19 How interesting

Adam Aleksic 9:20 ... it's a signal to scroll away.

Chris Williamson 9:22 [laughs] That's funny. Okay.

Adam Aleksic 9:23 See, no, I, I've trained myself. I just said signal to scroll away. I s- like uptalk because that's like I've sort of trained myself into speaking in a, I call an educational influencer accent which is different than that lifestyle influencer accent.

Chris Williamson 9:33 Okay, give me the educational influencer accent.

Adam Aleksic 9:35 Um, the most interesting thing about that is bl- you know, and I, uh, kind of stress more words to keep you watching my videos and I'll talk a little faster and I clearly talk quickly in real life but I think I... There's a difference between a conversational style and then when I'm purely reciting a scripted video to hook you maximally for your attention.

Chris Williamson 9:51 Hmm. Okay. So you're stressing individual words, speaking a bit more quickly. That's interesting that the valley girl vocal fry lifestyle influencer. What I get the sense of as someone who isn't exactly a, a, a, a connoisseur of that content is a softness, a sort of welcoming-ness, almost a familiarity, a, an attempt to sort of show, "Hey guys, welcome back to my channel." It's almost welcoming you through the door whereas it's much sharper when you're thinking about the educational influencer but given that one is kind of slow although there's no breaks but it's certainly not da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, it's much more cozy, uh, and the other is significantly more aggressive in terms of its pacing at least.

Adam Aleksic 10:34 Absolutely. Well it's again the question of what are you trying to do on the meta level? The lifestyle influencer wants you to feel like you are parasocially watching this video. An educational influencer wants you to feel like they're a trusted source of authority.

Chris Williamson 10:46 Ah, of course.

Adam Aleksic 10:47 And it's that level of communication that's happening there. I don't actually want you to relate to me 100%, I want you to think of me as a teacher if I'm talking to you.

Chris Williamson 10:55 So if you're speaking more quickly with authority in a almost staccato manner it's, there's brevity in the words.

Adam Aleksic 11:03 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:03 There's clipping. The consonants are always being pronounced pretty, pretty accurately to create shape and color. This is an interesting one. Have you looked much at diction? At the, the, the way that the mouth, the, um, functionality of the mouth, the physiology of the mouth works?

Adam Aleksic 11:15 100%. I mean that's a big part of linguistics, yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:17 Yeah. Unreal. So I, I, I just really loved the first time I ever worked with a speech coach and he said his description to me was, uh, vowels give words color and consonants give them structure and one of the problems being from the northeast of the UK we have a glottal stop typically so people say butta.

Adam Aleksic 11:34 Butta. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:34 There's two T's in butter and they're not saying either of them and neither was I when I was younger. Um, by removing or by losing those consonants you sort of fall through words. They don't have the same kind of structure, clarity, clippiness and bringing those back in helps to give it a little bit more form.

Adam Aleksic 11:54 But what you're describing here that you've modified your speaking style for what will perform better online is kind of exactly this greater homogenization effect that's happening. There's nothing less valid about a North England dialect than the received pronunciation or the transatlantic accent or any of these things. We just bullshit into thinking that some of these are like fancier than other accents, uh, but it's all in our heads and yet there's still this pressure to perform, to-use a more standard pronunciation of English.

Chris Williamson 12:19 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 12:20 For my book, I interviewed a lot of, um, Indian creators who feel like they can't speak in Indian accents because that's kind of maligned upon, right?

Chris Williamson 12:26 It's seen as less status.

Adam Aleksic 12:27 Yeah. Um, and they have to kind of code switch into more British sounding or American sounding accents.

Chris Williamson 12:33 Wow. Well, in my defense, or at least in my mother's defense, she was sort of slapping me on the wrists and beating it out of me as a child, so I didn't make it to adulthood without saying butter correctly.

Adam Aleksic 12:44 Well, that's because of an ingrained shame. There really is-

Chris Williamson 12:46 Of course

Adam Aleksic 12:46 ... nothing inherently wrong with you speaking in a northern English accent.

Chris Williamson 12:48 I'm gonna go back to it. I'm gonna fucking gonna go back to it, mate.

Adam Aleksic 12:51 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 12:51 You fucking cannot stop me from saying butter as much as I want. Uh-

Adam Aleksic 12:54 The cost is you might go less viral because the viewer has an expectation that I want you to be speaking the way I expect you to speak.

Chris Williamson 13:00 Also, there is a degree of legibility or illegibility.

Adam Aleksic 13:03 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:03 But i- if you get a strong Geordie accent from the northeast where I'm from or a strong Scouse accent from Liverpool, it is as close to a different language whilst being the same la- It's like one step away from speciation in terms of language.

Adam Aleksic 13:19 I, I think language can be correctly described as following a very similar path to evolution, and that there are bottleneck events and speciation events.

Chris Williamson 13:27 [laughs]

Adam Aleksic 13:28 And the algorithm, for example, I think is one such bottleneck, that it compresses our language into-

Chris Williamson 13:32 Mm

Adam Aleksic 13:32 ... you have to be speaking in these widely recognizable accents, but then it speciates and, and creates new environments. Um, and so on these different platforms and in the different fandom communities on the platforms, you will have new outgrowths of language that have first passed through this filter event.

Chris Williamson 13:48 What else? So we've had cozy lifestyle lady. We've had educational influencer man.

Adam Aleksic 13:57 There's-

Chris Williamson 13:57 Mr. Beast

Adam Aleksic 13:57 ... there's a beast in the room. Yeah, I was about to say. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 13:59 Very good. What, what's happening with this MrBeast's accent?

Adam Aleksic 14:02 If you look at his video and it, uh, if you look at how he actually speaks in interviews, they're completely different. He is very deliberately switching his accent to grab your attention as much as possible. He screams in it. "I just bought a private island. I'm giving away a million dollars." Like, he's, he's very, like, ostentatious with it. He's screaming at you every sentence, uh, because that works for his 14-year-old viewers' attention spans. Uh, he's speaking to a different audience than somebody trying to educate and a different audience than somebody trying to appear relatable because he's clearly being ostentatious. So it's reflected in his vocal style. Like, he sounds like he's about to give away a million dollars-

Chris Williamson 14:34 Mm

Adam Aleksic 14:34 ... even as he does it, you know?

Chris Williamson 14:35 So it's excitement, loudness. What else?

Adam Aleksic 14:40 Uh, shock and awe really. You just... You want the viewer to remain so dumbfounded watching the video that they don't even think to scroll away.

Chris Williamson 14:48 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 14:48 It's like a magician. You just wanna keep the attention going.

Chris Williamson 14:51 I saw a live streamer in the wild for the first time ever a couple of months ago, and I've... Obviously, I've seen live streams online. I've seen some IRL stuff, not tons. But seeing an IRL streamer from side camera or behind camera was a, a real experience. It was at the Beast Games 2 premiere in Hollywood, and what I found fascinating was because the live stream essentially never ends until it finally does, there is this permanent edging of the audience that there will be a payoff, but not yet, and there will be a payoff, but not yet. At least with Beast, it's like, "We're gonna go to the most expensive gym in the world, but first I'm gonna show you the cheapest, and now I'm gonna show you one a bit more expensive, and now I'm gonna..." And then finally you do it, and there's a payoff, and then you're done, and the video's finished.

Adam Aleksic 15:34 Yeah, different medium because it's bounded by a specific time, so you know the Beast video is 14 minutes long, but the live stream is lasting however long. It's kind of like-

Chris Williamson 15:41 Definitely

Adam Aleksic 15:41 ... live performers. If you go to, like, a public gathering and there's those people doing back flips in a crowd, like, uh, for money or whatever, they won't do the back flips immediately because nobody... like, people leave immediately.

Chris Williamson 15:50 They dance around for ages.

Adam Aleksic 15:51 They'll dance around. They'll do a round of collection of the money. They'll dance around some more. They'll do another round of collect, "I promise, guys, we're gonna get to the back flips," and you keep watching because they're edging you. It's what's... Yeah, exactly what's happening. And if you look at, like, TikTok live streams, I keep getting clickbaited by this, like, video of this guy trying to peel an egg, and he gets to the last part of the egg, and he's like... He keeps, like, edging us, like, "I'm gonna take off this-"

Chris Williamson 16:10 [laughs]

Adam Aleksic 16:10 "... this shell here." Um, but I think there's something of an important parallel between that-

Chris Williamson 16:17 That's good

Adam Aleksic 16:17 ... visual way that you get clickbaited and the auditory and linguistic way that happens as well.

Chris Williamson 16:21 Okay. How so?

Adam Aleksic 16:23 Well, live streaming, I think there is a dissolution between this online presentation and the offline presentation. I think it's particularly dangerous because it, it does play into this, um, attention mechanism, but in real life where you're exploiting real people for it. Um, linguistically speaking, that does mean you're gonna keep doing the uptalks. You're going to, um, speak in attention-grabbing manners. All of that is... Yeah, and you do kind of delay gratification. When I do a video and I script it out, I kind of don't immediately say the resolution of the question I pose at the start, and you'll see this a lot in-

Chris Williamson 16:57 Mm

Adam Aleksic 16:57 ... YouTube videos.

Chris Williamson 16:58 Mm-hmm. The payoff's held until the end.

Adam Aleksic 17:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 17:02 What other subcultures online do you think are particularly interesting linguistically?

Adam Aleksic 17:07 Oh, wow. I mean, I've spent a lot of time studying the language of the manosphere. I think it's particularly interesting because half of Gen Z slang is either African American English or it's from 4chan.

Chris Williamson 17:15 Okay.

Adam Aleksic 17:15 Um, and you do have a lot of those incel words trickling in. Um, uh, definitely 4chan was a linguistic incubator for decades, um, and, uh... well, a decade. And, uh, all these new words came, came out of it that are still slowly diffusing into more mainstream culture like maxing and pilled and, you know, um, gooning. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 17:36 What made 4chan such a useful incubator for language?

Adam Aleksic 17:40 There's the anonymity on the platform where users need to demonstrate a shared proficiency in slang to show that they're not a normie, and there's this huge selection pressure to show that you're one of the 4chan users.

Chris Williamson 17:51 And because it's such a constrained platform, you can't do video, you can't do voice, you're not doing face, you don't know the identity of someone, you need to very quickly, through your language, identify I am one of you, not one of them.

Adam Aleksic 18:03 Yeah, you can do, like, images and things, which, uh, that's how we get a lot of, um, memes also come from there. But, um, linguistically, yeah, there's, uh-

Chris Williamson 18:10 No one's posting a selfie though, right? To say, "This is me. I am one of us."

Adam Aleksic 18:13 In the sense that language is identity.

Chris Williamson 18:15 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 18:15 100%, these people on 4chan are also trying to build a shared identity for themselves and-

Chris Williamson 18:18 Self-branding, belonging

Adam Aleksic 18:20 ... and it's cool to come up with the new joke, and language spreads when it's funny. It does. We like saying things that are funny. That's reasonable. I... It's funny to say on podcast maxing.

Chris Williamson 18:28 Mm, yeah, that's true. Well, I am. I have been for eight years now. I am podcast maxing. Uh-What

Chris Williamson 18:33 about newscasters? How come they speak so strangely?

Adam Aleksic 18:37 They're doing the exact same thing. "This just in," and they speak in this authoritative kind of manner. It's doing the exact same thing as the educational influencer really. It's, it's a way of grabbing attention that's conditioned to a certain medium. And there's a broadcaster voice just as there's an influencer voice. There's, uh... They used to train, like, uh, American broadcasters to use this Mid-Atlan- uh, not... Yeah, m- mid- Midwestern US accent. That was kind of the homogenous US accent. And, uh, that was also a way of presenting in an accepted this is how a TV broadcaster is supposed to speak kind of way. And at home, they might still use, like, a local accent and speak in a different way.

Chris Williamson 19:13 It's interesting that that becomes enforced over time just through consensus and expectation, that there's some first mover somewhere. Maybe one person's particularly effective. There's a legendary newscaster, and this guy speaks in a way, and then the generation around him is shaped because that seems to be a successful approach, therefore... You see this online. Someone has a new thumbnail style, and now everybody's doing thumbnails like that, or somebody does a new video style, and everyone's doing videos like that. It's the same thing, but with the accent for newscasters. And then that becomes not only something effective for his colleagues at the time, but it's now shaping the entire future, and, and that's the expectation. Well, that's how newscasters speak. And if you were to come in and you would speak in a different manner, that would be very different.

Adam Aleksic 19:55 Right. That's what I was saying about the founder effect, and, uh, you kind of follow in the footsteps of people before you. For example, for my educational influencer accent, probably it's highly influenced by people like Hank Green or something, Vsauce. There's like... They were the-

Chris Williamson 20:06 Mm

Adam Aleksic 20:06 ... early educational influencers, and they're probably copying people like Bill Nye or something. So it always trickles back to something earlier. You know, you exist in the context.

Chris Williamson 20:14 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 20:14 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 20:14 Yeah, yeah, yeah. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. I have tried pretty much every brand of gym wear over the years. Most of it looks good on the website, but very little of it survives real-world training, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Gymshark. Their hybrid shorts, especially in onyx gray and navy, are basically my uniform in the gym at this point. They move properly. They don't bunch. They're super lightweight. You can wash and dry them in an afternoon. The Geo seamless T-shirt is what I train in almost every single session. Breathes properly, holds its shape after you wash it. Everything that Gymshark makes is lightweight and sweat-wicking and easy to wash and dries fast. And if you're still on the fence, they offer a 30-day free return, so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't like it, just send it back. Plus, they ship internationally. And right now, you can get 10% off everything sitewide by going to the link in the description below or heading to gym.sh/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM10 at checkout. That's gym.sh/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM10 at checkout.

Chris Williamson 21:12 What about sports commentators? Because they're doing something similar but a little bit distinct and different.

Adam Aleksic 21:17 Yeah. If, uh, news broadcasters are the equivalent of educational influencers, then sports commentators are kind of closer to MrBeast.

Chris Williamson 21:25 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 21:25 They, they wanna keep you excited. "Goal!" You know, like, it's very exciting. They wanna keep you excited about watching the game, and that's reasonable, yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:31 Yeah. But speaking with a lot of clarity again, like, super expressive. There's not much... Or I, I don't see very many filler words with those people, which I guess is because it's trained out of them. I have to imagine that over time, if you're looking to maximize relatability, uh, authenticity, a felt sense of belonging, what you're actually going to do is not sterilize your use of language too much to make it too precise, that that then feels contrived as opposed to something that's naturalistic.

Adam Aleksic 21:59 You wanna hit a fine line. I mean, think about, like, phone calls in movies. They famously n- never say goodbye. They just finish saying something, and they hang up. Because in real life, we do the wh- the whole, like, "All right. I'll see you later. Goodbye." But in a movie, that doesn't really work. So you do actually make it more concise.

Chris Williamson 22:14 No way, because it would just waste screen time.

Adam Aleksic 22:16 It would waste screen time if-

Chris Williamson 22:16 You don't need to hear you-

Adam Aleksic 22:17 Yeah, exactly.

Chris Williamson 22:18 "Yep. Okay, okay. Well, uh, you have a good... Uh, yep. It's fine. G- Yeah, no worries. Yeah, I'll catch you later. Bye." I mean, five seconds that you didn't need in the movie.

Adam Aleksic 22:26 So it's performing the idea of a phone call while not actually doing phone call as we actually do it.

Chris Williamson 22:31 I never thought about that. Holy shit. Uh, but sterilizing language too much obviously puts

Chris Williamson 22:38 it acro- You did a great TED Talk. I did a, a TEDx Talk f- five, six years ago, something now, and, uh, one of the things that I realized as I was getting ready for that and doing the preparation was I actually need to de-train my knowledge of my own talk in a way so that it doesn't sound too contrived, so it doesn't sound too performative.

Adam Aleksic 22:59 There's that idea of what a TED Talk sounds like. I mean, there's a great video on YouTube of, like, guy just doing TED Talk by saying things that don't mean anything, but he's saying in the cadence of a TED Talk.

Chris Williamson 23:10 That's funny.

Adam Aleksic 23:10 Um, definitely recommend looking that up. But yeah, there's a, there's... You can... You know what I mean when I say there's a cadence of what a TED Talk sounds like.

Chris Williamson 23:17 Mm-hmm.

Adam Aleksic 23:18 I think it's kind of dead. I think it's in the past, and, um, TED Talks are also... They've lost a lot of their prestige of what it was, and the way people should be doing TED Talks now is just clip farming, which is the future. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 23:31 The way that people should be doing TED Talks now is just clip far- So if you get booked for a TED Talk, you should just try and get clip farmed?

Adam Aleksic 23:37 [laughs] I think so.

Chris Williamson 23:37 How would you do that? What's-

Adam Aleksic 23:38 What actually matters... Like, I don't know. The audience of TED Talk is, I, I guess, aspirational speakers themselves or, um, like, it's... And if you have a real message to say, it's probably not the audience that's there. It's probably better if you transmit it on the internet, um, because you could reach that audience.

Chris Williamson 23:57 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 23:57 And that's the idea behind six seven and behind jester maxing and all that stuff, is that distribution matters more than the content itself.

Chris Williamson 24:05 Oh, interesting.

Adam Aleksic 24:05 That you're just saying the thing that goes viral. And if we're existing in a, a age of social media virality, the TED Talk is kind of a dead format, um, existing as this quasi-online talk, which was fantastic in the early days of YouTube when there wasn't enough content going on.

Chris Williamson 24:20 Yep.

Adam Aleksic 24:20 But now the media's ecosystem is oversaturated, and the TED Talks have way fewer views than they used to-

Chris Williamson 24:26 Mm

Adam Aleksic 24:26 ... because they don't do the same function that they did in the early internet.

Chris Williamson 24:29 Well, especially because one video can get... You can write a book, and then each sentence can be sold individually, and then even those sentences can be reproduced and reproduced and reproduced, and individual productions of those can be re-shared. So yeah, you're actually looking for as much distribution as possible. When, uh, what was it called? Um, the HH bomb thing that happened with the guys in the Miami club where they played that Kanye song and they-

Adam Aleksic 24:55 Oh, yeah. Right

Chris Williamson 24:55 ... went in, in insane viral. That wasEvery single second of that video was broken down and shared and re-shared and published and republished and commented on, and that's a single book just being sold word by word essentially.

Adam Aleksic 25:08 And what that points to is that there is a dangerous misalignment between human preferences, like I, I can imagine that most of us don't think that song is good for humanity, and then what goes viral online. Because online there are certain emotions that are rewarded more than others. There's anger, fear, awe, humor, things that trigger a state of, of mental arousal where your brain is more activated. Now, things that don't do that is like contentment. Contentment makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but it doesn't trigger your brain to click a like button. The like button, of course, is more of a me- me- metric of how willing you are to click this button than it is whether you like something, and you're more willing to click a button if your brain is activated, and your brain's not activated when you feel warm and fuzzy. Which means warm and fuzzy ideas are not gonna spread online. The things that are gonna spread are rage bait and clickbait.

Chris Williamson 25:49 That's so fascinating. So if you're a meditation teacher, by design because you make people feel good and you get them out of that brain mode, you're going to get sl- less engagement.

Adam Aleksic 26:01 Just-

Chris Williamson 26:01 Which means that you're gonna go less viral.

Adam Aleksic 26:02 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 26:02 Which means there's less of an incentive for you to keep doing your content.

Adam Aleksic 26:05 Look at the wellness space. The same way movie phone calls perform what it's like to be a phone call, wellness influencers are performing the idea of wellness, but it's this hyper aestheticized, sanitized, clean girl thing where you're on a yoga mat doing Pilates or whatever. But that doesn't... You're like, you're presenting this, um, hyper wellness idea that's not true wellness, and if you're actually feeling warm and fuzzy, you don't need to prove that to other people. Uh, you don't need to play like you're feeling good. You can just-

Chris Williamson 26:31 Yeah, you're not doing yoga in the living room with your floor-to-ceiling windows, and you're s- waving sage everywhere. You're sat on the couch relaxing.

Adam Aleksic 26:38 So sometimes it's just watching a movie is-

Chris Williamson 26:39 Yeah

Adam Aleksic 26:39 ... you know, sitting on the couch.

Chris Williamson 26:40 But not sufficiently visually interesting, so it wouldn't be compelling for people.

Chris Williamson 26:44 What about the gay male accent? What's going on there?

Adam Aleksic 26:47 [laughs] Yeah, 100%. There's a lot of research on... Well, emerging research on lesbian accent as well, but gay accent, um, that there is a certain way of talking, um, that of course will differ between different communities, and it's not a monolith. Um, but you, you know, you can recognize when somebody talks in a gay accent. Um, there, there's a few sociological things going on. I think it's incorrect to say that they talk more like women, but they adopt many strategies that are similar, uh, to how women have talked. Um, they raise certain vowels, and, um, they will, um... Yeah. Um, and it's, it's all k- kind of the same identity thing. It was historically a way, like the gay slang words, which is a lot of our Gen Z slang words also come from, uh, gay ballroom speech.

Chris Williamson 27:30 What like?

Adam Aleksic 27:32 Oh, like slay, serve, queen, cooked, ate, uh-

Chris Williamson 27:35 Cooked is gay?

Adam Aleksic 27:38 Yeah, I, I'm pretty sure that come... Well, there's cooking and cooked, which come from different sources.

Chris Williamson 27:42 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Aleksic 27:42 Cooking is sports slang. Um-

Chris Williamson 27:44 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, playing well.

Adam Aleksic 27:46 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:47 Yeah. Unreal. So I wonder if there's stuff that even we wouldn't notice, that there's little, uh, identifiers in the gay community like tops speak in one way and bottoms speak in another. Or, um, well, I guess guy- there's guys that present in a much more masculine manner, and there's guys that present in a much more feminine manner. Interesting conversation I had over dinner, probably best to have it over dinner, um, looking at, uh, what it is the, the, the presentation that most straight men notice in gay men, and what they notice is what you said, which is, are you coding as female? Not as female-

Adam Aleksic 28:23 Yeah

Chris Williamson 28:23 ... but in a manner that somebody who isn't a part of that culture would identify as feminine.

Adam Aleksic 28:28 I'm gonna sound like a broken clock, but everything is performing the idea of something, and so gay men perform the idea of, of being gay, which is fine. Straight men perform the idea of being straight, and it's also a way to signal to other people. Like, uh, in historically, um, gay men had to be closeted, and they needed ways of signaling to other gay men that, "Hey, uh, I'm chill, and, uh, we should hang out." [laughs] You know? And, uh, that's sort of linguistically there are little cues you can drop that hint at I'm a gay man.

Chris Williamson 28:54 Right. What like?

Adam Aleksic 28:56 Well, using certain slang words.

Chris Williamson 28:57 Right.

Adam Aleksic 28:57 Like, uh, uh, I'm thinking about like, I don't know, cottaging in Britain, but when homosexuality was illegal.

Chris Williamson 29:03 Mm-hmm.

Adam Aleksic 29:03 There's like certain ways of tapping your foot, or Polari was a whole gay cant, like a, a kind of a micro language created in England that was used specifically by gay people as a way of evading detection by police because police didn't know what was going on, and it was a way of signaling a shared identity for themselves. And we see sort of gay micro languages emerge everywhere. In the Philippines, there's one called Swardspeak. Um, there's one in South Africa. Every community, because gay people ha- have been historically kinda marginalized, they need ways to come up with subversion of the traditional norms of language.

Chris Williamson 29:35 Do you know what capoeira is?

Adam Aleksic 29:38 It sounds British.

Chris Williamson 29:39 It's a Brazilian martial art.

Adam Aleksic 29:41 Br- Brazilian is what I meant, yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:41 So, um, capoeira was a martial art developed in Brazil when they were under a, uh, military rule, and they weren't allowed to practice fighting because they didn't want there to be a military force-

Adam Aleksic 29:53 Yeah

Chris Williamson 29:53 ... that could rise up. So this thing, if you watch a video of it, looks very distinctive, very dancey. It kind of looks like that. I mean, it very quickly gets into a fighting art. But, um, that makes me think about gay guys in Britain before it was legal having to have a secret language, and a Brazilian martial art developed by Africans taken to the country as slaves. That was it. So they, they weren't allowed to practice fighting, and they've got music that goes with it as well, which would be a way to hide what was going on. "Oh, it's just a party. We don't need to worry about that. It's just a party." And yeah, the-

Adam Aleksic 30:25 Wow, yeah.

Chris Williamson 30:26 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 30:26 That's amazing.

Chris Williamson 30:26 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 30:28 Well, if we accept that language is a tool of identity, identity is tied to power. Who's in control is part of your identity. And so we see the English language, which is defined by these white British people in the 1700s or whatever, and we're still following-

Chris Williamson 30:43 Love them

Adam Aleksic 30:44 ... the, the norms. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 30:44 Love them.

Adam Aleksic 30:45 Uh, but it doesn't represent all the speakers of English, and so different speakers try to come up with different ways to subvert that structure that's imposed upon them. And so a lot of that has been African American English s- speakers who now have come up with a lot of slang words that later bled into mainstream Gen Z slang. Or, um, specifically gay people because, uh, these are straight white men, uh, creating language. And so it's a way of subverting, of establishing their own norms of language.

Chris Williamson 31:09 Hmm.

Adam Aleksic 31:10 Um-King and queen, for example, like the slang word what's up king, you know, like that or what's up queen, that, uh, that comes from ballroom slang in New York City in the 1980s, which was this like Black, gay, Latino space. Um-

Chris Williamson 31:22 Black, gay, Latino space.

Adam Aleksic 31:23 Black and Latino gay, you know, gay people-

Chris Williamson 31:25 Right

Adam Aleksic 31:25 ... uh, in New York City. Um, and it was a way of elevating people, uh, in that community. I see you on the status of royalty.

Chris Williamson 31:33 Right.

Adam Aleksic 31:33 Because y- we are not seen as that by society, and that even goes back even further to the history of kinda like, uh, Black people in the United States. Um, a lot of slang goes from Black people to gay people, and then to like the straight white girlfriends of gay men, and then to the mainstream English. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 31:49 Right. Okay. So there's a-

Adam Aleksic 31:50 There's a pipeline. Yeah

Chris Williamson 31:51 ... a four-person human centipede with-

Adam Aleksic 31:53 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 31:54 ... normies at the end and Black people at the front.

Adam Aleksic 31:56 That's pretty much it.

Chris Williamson 31:57 Fantastic.

Adam Aleksic 31:57 Or 4chan is the other end of the- [laughs]

Chris Williamson 31:59 4chan, Black people-

Adam Aleksic 32:00 There's two centipede front

Chris Williamson 32:00 ... gay people-

Adam Aleksic 32:01 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 32:01 ... cool people, normies.

Adam Aleksic 32:03 Language spreads when it's funny or cool, and it's cool when Black people use it, and it's funny when 4chan people use it. It can be considered funny, unfortunately, when Black people say things as well, which is a whole genre of hood irony memes like, uh, um, cap, uh, like, uh, as an example. Um, or huz is a recent slang word.

Chris Williamson 32:20 What's that?

Adam Aleksic 32:21 Um, it's like a slang word for hoes. Um-

Chris Williamson 32:23 [laughs]

Adam Aleksic 32:23 ... but it comes from like a parody of African American English.

Chris Williamson 32:25 Right.

Adam Aleksic 32:26 Um, or gyatt. That was, that was also kinda making fun of-

Chris Williamson 32:29 Big ass.

Adam Aleksic 32:29 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 32:30 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 32:30 Um, but it's comes from the s- the word goddamn pronounced in an exaggerated African American accent. Um, and of course, when I say that there's many different African American accents in the same way there's many different gay accents and many different internet accents. And, uh, I really hate to speak of language as a monolith. I'm not even sure language exists as like a thing. It's just like we all speak separately, kind of close to people around us.

Chris Williamson 32:50 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 32:50 Um, and there's like a gradient of what language is rather than a monolithic thing. The monolithic thing is this institutional assumption that there is a dictionary that can capture a snapshot of what language is.

Chris Williamson 32:59 So every person has their own language in this regard?

Adam Aleksic 33:02 Yes. It's called idio- uh, idiolect from the Greek word idios, meaning one's own, and we all speak in a completely unique way, conditioned by our background, our upbringing, our education, the people we hung out with, the words that resonated with us based on just our history of h- interacting with language. Um, I find that really compelling that you have a linguistic footprint unlike anybody else. That's how they caught the Unabomber. Um-

Chris Williamson 33:23 Yes. His brother found out that he said, "Eat your cake and have it too," as opposed to, "Have your cake and eat it too," because the one that he used actually makes more sense but was completely unique.

Adam Aleksic 33:33 Exactly. Um, and so we all have like these little quirks. Whether you think you do or not, they're there.

Chris Williamson 33:38 What about lesbian accents?

Adam Aleksic 33:40 This is harder to identify, and, uh, there are studies showing that speakers can identify a lesbian accent, but there are very mixed results on what defines one. There is, again, indication that they speak a little closer to the ideal of a masculine language, and yet, at the same time, it would be reductive to say that. So there's certain stuff going on with perhaps, uh, lowered vowels and, um, maybe a deeper voice, but again, I would be generalizing to say that we know for sure. There definitely is something going on-

Chris Williamson 34:09 Mm

Adam Aleksic 34:09 ... but the studies aren't there to fully explain it.

Chris Williamson 34:12 It would make sense if you were to think about, uh, much of gay fashion compared with straight fashion for men. You would say, "Well, there's a bit more flair. There's maybe a bit more color. Uh, the, there's more beautification. There's more accessories." Okay, that, that seems to code somewhat feminine. And if you were to look at gay women compared with straight women, say, "Well, there's more plaid and g- jeans and sort of male-coded clothes, a little bit more loose-fitting sometimes," uh, that would tend to code a bit more male. You go, okay, well, it would make sense that if you're presenting outwardly that way, that maybe your language would match that. But it would also be unique and distinct because gay men aren't trying to be women. That would be very bad for the gay men they're trying to attract.

Adam Aleksic 34:58 Right.

Chris Williamson 34:58 And gay women aren't trying to be men 'cause that wouldn't attract any of the gay women.

Adam Aleksic 35:01 They're, they're performing this thing that is the idea of gay man again, uh, which is maybe close- closer to women than straight men.

Chris Williamson 35:06 Performing the idea of being a gay man and-

Adam Aleksic 35:09 All we're doing all the time is performing, LARPing. We're just pretending to be on a podcast right now, but in doing so, we actually are, you know?

Chris Williamson 35:14 Can you... [laughs] I need you to dissect. Can you blow that apart for me?

Adam Aleksic 35:17 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 35:17 It's really cool. I'm not entirely sure what you mean.

Adam Aleksic 35:20 Yeah, yeah. Um, I think people should all read this guy Erving Goffman. He's a sociologist from the 1960s, and he comes up with this, uh, great book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and he describes how we all adopt faces or roles in society. Um, there's a front-facing role and a back-facing. Like, so when you're on stage or off stage, and when you're on stage right now, we're presenting to p- the public. We are on stage. We're presenting as ourselves, but as soon as we get off the podcast, we might speak more casually.

Chris Williamson 35:45 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 35:45 Um, because there's a different way of communicating when you know there's this invisible audience present. Um, in the same way, when you're literally on a stage or you're literally backstage, that you'll do the same thing, but if you're talking in front of your parents versus you're talking with your friends, you'll adopt different registers. And it's that kinda the same thing we were describing with different rooms and different platforms, and you, uh, have an idea of what your environment is. And you will mold yourself into the role you see that environment as bringing to you.

Chris Williamson 36:13 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 36:13 And so we do everything through this idea of, of role, and all of what we do is a performance. To be a man is kind of a performance. Like, we need to keep replicating this idea of manhood. We both, um, like, have beards. We both, uh, dress and talk a certain way. Um, and in doing so, we're kind of adopting symbols of masculinity, and Clavicular is doing a great job of that himself. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 36:36 I've got a, I g- I've got a take on that, which is I think it's, uh, the most caricatured traits of masculinity, uh, not necessarily in terms of speech, you know, because you might say a powerful, precise, uh, educated or a brusque maybe even, who- someone who's very curt with the way that they speak, a strong and silent type. But that's because masculinity is couched within 2026. What does it mean-

Adam Aleksic 37:04 Right

Chris Williamson 37:04 ... for masculinity to be that way? I think visually, masculinity has just been going in one direction. If you look at the tracking of Luke Skywalker, uh, star action figures over time, in the '60s, he was super skinny, and then in the '90s-

Adam Aleksic 37:18 Oh, that's so interesting

Chris Williamson 37:19 ... he gained m- Do me a comparison. Just search, uh, ChatGPT Luke SkywalkerAction figure over time comparison. And, um, yeah, he just, he goes on a very heavy course of testosterone for about six decades.

Adam Aleksic 37:32 That's really interesting.

Chris Williamson 37:33 And, um-

Adam Aleksic 37:33 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 37:33 ... it just gets more and more and more and more and more jacked. Um, so I think what's happening is a performance of masculinity. That's the best way to put it.

Adam Aleksic 37:41 Luke Skywalker looks maxed.

Chris Williamson 37:42 Luke Skywalker absolutely mogs, dude.

Adam Aleksic 37:44 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 37:45 Um, yeah, he, he's performing masculinity. It's a, a male-to-male visual comparison.

Adam Aleksic 37:51 And there is always an evolving definition of masculinity too. Like back in ancient Rome, being masculine means you could like, as long as... You could have sex with other men, as long as you weren't a bottom. That would be like not masculine. But that was-

Chris Williamson 38:02 Is that true?

Adam Aleksic 38:03 ... that was the definition of masculinity for a certain period in ancient Rome.

Chris Williamson 38:05 You're allowed to fuck, just you're, you, you have-

Adam Aleksic 38:08 Yeah

Chris Williamson 38:08 ... to fuck. If you are fuck-

Adam Aleksic 38:09 Caesar, Caesar was famously offended, uh, not at the accusation that he was gay, but the accusation that he was a bottom, uh, because that's the Roman idea.

Chris Williamson 38:17 [laughs]

Adam Aleksic 38:28 But it's an e- evolving idea.

Chris Williamson 38:29 [laughs]

Adam Aleksic 38:29 Whether men should have long hair or short hair, whether, you know, we should, uh, you know... What it means to be a man is always a moving target, and we're always performing for this target. So it just proves how arbitrary it is.

Chris Williamson 38:40 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 38:40 That right now, of course, there is a current 2026 idea of a man that we're performing toward.

Chris Williamson 38:46 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 38:47 But that's a very different idea than back when we were wearing togas.

Chris Williamson 38:50 Mm. That's 1977 to 1995. Heavy course of testosterone, dude.

Adam Aleksic 38:55 Unbelievable.

Chris Williamson 38:56 Now, what, and then they've used the, uh, stats of what it would be like to give the same proportions to a human on either side, 37-inch shoulders and a 32-inch waist versus 52-inch [laughs] shoulders and a 27-inch waist.

Adam Aleksic 39:12 Right. The last thing that looks nothing like, uh-

Chris Williamson 39:14 A human

Adam Aleksic 39:14 ... Mark Hamill. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:15 Yeah, a human. A quick aside, there is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it. 95% of people don't get enough fiber, not because they're being careless, but because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually quite hard. But that's why Momentous built Fiber+. See, fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients, how stable your energy is, and how quickly you recover. If your gut isn't dialed in, everything else that you're doing is working at a fraction of its potential. Fiber+ is a three-in-one formula built to address digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once, and this cinnamon flavor is unreal. You might think, "Fiber, wow, I bet that tastes great." Well, yeah, actually it does, doubters. Uh, I really enjoyed this. Best of all, Momentous offers a 30-day money back guarantee, so if you're not sure, you can buy Fiber+, try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back, and they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout.

Chris Williamson 40:32 What about emojis? Because they're kind of like language and picture, I guess. They feel like modern hieroglyphics.

Adam Aleksic 40:38 Yeah. Well, there's a few different functions of emojis. You can use it to substitute a word. Like, uh, we see this with, uh, ICE protests. People want to censor the word ICE because they think the algorithm is like, uh, gonna hamper their video, so they'll just sub it out with the ice cube emoji. That's a substitute of emoji. Then you have emojis that are more paralanguage meant to augment your sentence. So if I say something and then I comment the... or I have a sentence and then at the end of the sentence there's like a laughing emoji or a sneezing emoji or a crying emoji, that serves as a sort of a tone tag telling you what the emotional form of my sentence is. Um, and then there's a few other separate ways. You can send them individually. You could use them as reactions. Um, there's a lot of things going on, but they absolutely are linguistic in the sense of they carry meaning, and they communicate something from one person to another.

Chris Williamson 41:25 I saw a court case where they were trying to determine what this emoji meant. Had it have... Did it imply-

Adam Aleksic 41:35 Was it the farmer in, uh, Canada?

Chris Williamson 41:37 What was this one?

Adam Aleksic 41:37 Okay. So there's a great court case where there was a, a farmer who had a contract for grain shipments, uh, and he would occasionally, uh, like they, they did month by month, and they would sign off with a yes or a whatever, uh, and then one month the farmer signs off with an okay emoji, just like thumbs up.

Chris Williamson 41:56 Okay.

Adam Aleksic 41:56 And the grain supplier doesn't deliver the grain or something like that, and then the farmer sues the grain supplier. Maybe I'm getting it the other way around. But the point is, the court case was about whether the thumbs up emoji legally constituted an affirmation of this agreement occurring. Um, one person said this could be acknowledgement, and the other person said this is a direct agreement, and I think the court case ruled, um, in favor of thumbs up being an agreement, but it was kind of based on previous context, right? Because previous context was that-

Chris Williamson 42:26 There's a long established history of emojis in court cases.

Adam Aleksic 42:29 Right. Well, there's a few things going on. Yeah. What was the one you were thinking about?

Chris Williamson 42:32 There was a, a murder case, and it was about intent. It was about whether or not this person had intended to kill somebody or not, and, um, w- it- it's an interpretation of what this emoji means. And it's so funny because it's a single thing, right? It's... There's no intonation. I guess it's couched in what has been said before and after, but if you just take it on its own, uh, there is no different way to say it. There is no different way to spell it, and it's only been around for 15, less than 15 years, something like that probably. Okay, so the definition of it hasn't had enough time to really cement itself and become established.

Adam Aleksic 43:09 Well, that's the thing that, um-

Chris Williamson 43:09 So it's so fluid

Adam Aleksic 43:10 ... emoji definitions are also constantly changing. Like the crying emoji once meant literally crying, and then it meant laughing, and then, uh, it also... The laughing emoji is now seen as like ironic by some people.

Chris Williamson 43:20 Yeah, you shouldn't use the laughing emoji.

Adam Aleksic 43:22 Right.

Chris Williamson 43:23 Yeah, that's kind of cringe because-

Adam Aleksic 43:24 Unless you're trying to like signal boomer.

Chris Williamson 43:26 Correct. Yes.

Adam Aleksic 43:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:27 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the horseshoe has come all the way back around-

Adam Aleksic 43:30 Right

Chris Williamson 43:30 ... again.

Adam Aleksic 43:31 You can post-ironically use it, I think.

Chris Williamson 43:33 Yeah. Okay, yeah, we're in the post cry laughing face world.

Adam Aleksic 43:36 [laughs] Right.

Chris Williamson 43:37 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. What's the-What's the direction of etymology? It feels like there's sort of an entropy to words, that they move in a direction. Are they always getting simpler and shorter over time? I- is there an arrow of, of motion when it comes to word development?

Adam Aleksic 43:54 I think language, more than anything, is a reflection of who we are as people right now. The word etymology comes from Greek etumos, meaning truth. There's a truth to the word that we look at, and it tells us something about humanity, about who we are as people, because again, this is a tool of identity. And so less of there being a direction and more of it just reflecting who we are right now, what we're feeling. It's... Language is our way to categorize what we think is going on. I'll use words to describe my reality, and then I'll use that to communicate it to you.

Chris Williamson 44:24 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 44:24 So it's describing reality, and then it's communicating that reality.

Chris Williamson 44:26 Mm-hmm.

Adam Aleksic 44:26 If our reality changes, yeah, language will change as a result-

Chris Williamson 44:30 Mm

Adam Aleksic 44:30 ... uh, because now we have to describe something different. So we have- we're using fewer words to describe different types of plants than we were in the 1800s because we're interacting with fewer plants. That's kind of sad. Um-

Chris Williamson 44:43 Oh, okay. And what about when... What's the, the term for when a word gets, uh, broken down to make, to be made shorter? So, uh, goodbye is a good example. God be with you.

Adam Aleksic 44:54 God be with you. And then, yeah, contracted to goodbye, and then eventually you can truncate it to just bye.

Chris Williamson 44:59 Bye.

Adam Aleksic 44:59 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:59 Yeah. What's that called? That's a contraction?

Adam Aleksic 45:02 Uh, uh, abbreviation, contraction. There are different ways of doing this. You can make words, uh, shorter, and you can also make portmanteaus, where you combine different words. Um, and, uh, yeah, we're making new words all the time. Jestermaxing is a great evidence of that.

Chris Williamson 45:15 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 45:15 Uh, we're combining new words in new ways. And but that sort of reflects our new reality. And so if reality adjusts, we will both come up with new words, and we'll lose old ones because language is a moving,

Adam Aleksic 45:26 living thing.

Chris Williamson 45:27 You mentioned, uh, uh, Black people, gay people, cool people, normal people. Young people, how much-

Adam Aleksic 45:34 Mm

Chris Williamson 45:34 ... do they drive language forward? Because young people are almost always seen as being cool, but they're also the ones that have got the least, uh, cemented history with regards to their linguistic use.

Adam Aleksic 45:44 Yeah, exactly. They're the ones that are the earliest to adopt new words because older people have this cemented idea of what language is. Younger people are both more flexible with that, and they're trying to build a shared identity for themselves. And I know I keep bringing identity into it, but that's what language is. It's a way of, uh, you know, figuring out who you are and what kind of words you wanna use.

Chris Williamson 46:03 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 46:03 And you don't wanna sound like your mother. You wanna sound like your, your peers.

Chris Williamson 46:07 Yeah. How much of the changes in language is just because kids want to differatie- differentiate themselves from their parents?

Adam Aleksic 46:12 That's a huge part of it. Most of language change, I would say, is driven by peop- like, right now, honestly, middle schoolers. But historically, people between the ages of, like, 10 and 25 are the ones coming up with slang. Now, of course, there's different types of how language gets adopted. There's institutional words. So, like, iPhone is a new word, but it's not a slang word. Uh, podcast, uh, a shortening of iPod plus broadcast, um, that's sort of new. But that com- these things come from more institutional avenues.

Chris Williamson 46:39 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 46:40 Uh, that's another route or mechanism of language change. But for the slang, which is this kind of lower status feeling of language that eventually can become just real language-

Chris Williamson 46:50 Mm

Adam Aleksic 46:51 ... um, that comes from younger people. So all the video game terms we see in, uh, bleeding into mainstream English, um, NPC, skill issue-

Chris Williamson 46:58 Mm

Adam Aleksic 46:58 ... that kind of stuff. Um, or all of the, yeah, the, the Black people, uh, or the, uh, incel language, um, all of that's kind of the- driven by young people right now.

Chris Williamson 47:10 How effective are institutions at top-down dictating language and linguistic use? Because when I think about, and this might just be because I'm terminally online, when I think about most of the language that I see, yeah, you're right with podcasts, but they're usually categories. They're not the sort of thing that people are using as a, a, a important identifier of the way that they're put together, and it doesn't really seem to be shaping culture. Maybe it represents something that shapes culture, but the words itself won't. So how easy is it for people in power to top-down dictate the way that language is used?

Adam Aleksic 47:46 If it feels like a word is intentionally being forced upon you, we actually often feel a resistance to it. There's a, in the, in the movie Mean Girls, Gretchen famously couldn't make the word fetch happen. She was trying to get people-

Chris Williamson 47:56 Stop trying to make fetch happen

Adam Aleksic 47:57 ... yeah, yeah. Um, and that's because it felt forced. So if, if you feel like someone is pushing a word onto you, you might actually not wanna adopt it. There is a difference with institutional acceptance. So if you see a word in a dictionary, uh, that's just like, this is accepted as language, um, even though, of course, there's just an idea of language. Um, but you might point to that now, and you'll see news outlets only use words that are in the dictionary, or, uh, books and academic publishing and all this stuff will use this standard idea of language, which is filtered through the institutions.

Chris Williamson 48:28 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 48:28 So they're not forcing the word. They're merely, once a word has been used around for long enough, they legitimize it.

Chris Williamson 48:33 Mm.

Chris Williamson 48:34 Lots of people have got issues with the word like, um, uh, you know. What are some of the older versions of filler words? Because it can't have just been now that filler words were brought in.

Adam Aleksic 48:48 Yeah. Well, there have always been filler words, and um might be the, one of the most universal words. There's, across different languages, that mid central vowel, uh, shows up in a lot of when people are thinking. I know Spanish speakers use, like, a uh, or it's, it's some kind of vowel that's close to the center often, um, that's used when... [laughs] Ha, you just, I just said it. That's used when you're thinking about something, and that's a universal constant that we think about things, and we need time to say things, um, for, you know-

Chris Williamson 49:18 It's a holding pattern.

Adam Aleksic 49:19 Yeah, yeah. It's the floral thing again.

Chris Williamson 49:20 Um, yeah.

Adam Aleksic 49:22 I think it's stigmatized because it's associated with not thinking through things. Like especially is associated with, like, the Valley girls, and tho- those women are stigmatized just because they're not seen as speaking standard English, even though there's nothing inherently wrong. And actually, like has a lot of different applications. There's the quotative like, where, um, you can sayYou can say something, you can quote someone directly, "I said this," or you can adopt an affect, "I was like this." And that actually serves a different linguistic function. That's actually a really beautiful thing that you can adopt a persona in the middle of speech instead of directly claiming to quote something.

Chris Williamson 50:00 Hmm.

Adam Aleksic 50:01 Like implies it doesn't have to be 100% accurate, but-

Chris Williamson 50:04 It's a self-analogy

Adam Aleksic 50:05 ... I was like this. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:05 It's a self-simile. Yeah, yeah.

Adam Aleksic 50:06 I was like, it's a self-simile. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:08 Yeah. [laughs] Uh, yeah, one of the things, someone brought this up, I can't remember who I was speaking to. Um, uh, The Etymologicon. Who wrote that? Mark-

Adam Aleksic 50:19 Mark Forsyth

Chris Williamson 50:20 ... Forsyth. Mark Forsyth.

Adam Aleksic 50:20 Yeah. That's the book that got me into etymology. I read-

Chris Williamson 50:22 No fucking way.

Adam Aleksic 50:23 I read that in 2016, and I was like, "This shit is gas." And I, I just started reading more etymology books, started a little blog for myself. Um, I don't think anybody read it, but then I studied linguistics in college and ended up becoming a linguistics influencer, but it started because of that book.

Chris Williamson 50:38 No way.

Adam Aleksic 50:38 So I do-

Chris Williamson 50:39 Did you read Elements of Eloquence as well?

Adam Aleksic 50:40 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:41 Bro. So Mark's, Mark's great, and I, I brought up the holding pattern-like stuff. He had this great take, which is if you just roll back to your grandparents' generation, a lot of the time, sentences would begin with, "Well, you know, it's... " What we, what we must... It's this sort of... There would be a, almost a bloviating approach to it. I have this guy that I bring on all the time, Rory Sutherland. He's kind of like a, my mad uncle, and every time that he speaks, there's precision, and then there's these parentheses of noise, but it's not like. It's still filler to some degrees. It's padding, and it's nice. It actually provides a little bit of breathing room because he speaks quite quickly too. So having a, "Ah, I know this is coming into land," um, the same as getting off the phone. "Okay, yep, yep. No worries. I've got-

Adam Aleksic 51:33 Right

Chris Williamson 51:33 ... yep, yep, yep." It's that, it's foreplay and post-coital talking talk.

Adam Aleksic 51:38 Exactly. No, I think we talked about floor holding, but you gotta take the floor in the first place.

Chris Williamson 51:42 Hmm.

Adam Aleksic 51:43 And you were describing that "you know" is a great example. You are signaling that you're taking the conversational turn. There's, in influencer spaces, people start videos with, "No, because... No, because why did this happen?" And it's just like a, it doesn't mean anything really except for-

Chris Williamson 51:56 Falling halfway through a sentence-

Adam Aleksic 51:57 Yeah

Chris Williamson 51:57 ... it does, though. It feels as if-

Adam Aleksic 51:58 It creates this in medias res feeling that you, you want to... We resonate more with the video when we feel like we're already in the middle of it, rather than having to deal with this whole introduction. So, but it does-

Chris Williamson 52:09 Oh, that's cool

Adam Aleksic 52:09 ... it does still serve to grab your attention and continue from

Adam Aleksic 52:14 the middle of a thought.

Chris Williamson 52:15 What are some of the other powerful linguistic tricks that creators either are using a lot of or you think that more creators should be using in order to... That's interesting. I didn't think about, "No, because..." And you go, "Hang on. I didn't see what happened before. Am I... I, I guess I'm in this now." Uh, what else is-

Adam Aleksic 52:32 Yeah

Chris Williamson 52:32 ... what else are some good, uh, keyholes in the brain that you can latch into?

Adam Aleksic 52:37 Uh, I'm trying less to provide advice to creators and more just get people aware of what creators are already doing to you.

Chris Williamson 52:43 Oh, okay.

Adam Aleksic 52:43 Everything is about attention.

Chris Williamson 52:44 You're like, you're like a public, public service announcement for creators.

Adam Aleksic 52:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 52:47 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 52:47 PSA.

Chris Williamson 52:48 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 52:48 Everybody's doing everything for your attention.

Chris Williamson 52:50 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 52:51 The platforms have monetized your attention. They are commodifying your data and your information and are trying to sell you ads. Everything's based around your attention. They create incentive structures now for influencers to replicate, where the attention economy famously just runs around what will grab your attention. And so that means our language will all serve that end primarily, and then there's maybe a secondary purpose of I want to sound like I'm, I know what I'm talking about, or I want to sound relatable. But it starts with attention, and we'll use keywords. Like, all words are keywords at this point. Metadata used to be, like, their search engine optimization terms that you would put in a website description to make sure it ranks higher.

Chris Williamson 53:28 Hmm.

Adam Aleksic 53:28 Every single term now is a search engine optimization term because the algorithm is looking at every single word you use, and it's using that to create a, a cluster representation of what your video is in this mathematical space.

Chris Williamson 53:39 Hmm.

Adam Aleksic 53:39 And it uses that to push out a video. And so by using a word, you are creating a signal for the algorithm that this video should be distributed in a certain way, and then you are also creating signals for the viewers that you should look at the video a certain way.

Chris Williamson 53:52 Hmm.

Adam Aleksic 53:52 There's several meta layers to everything we're saying.

Chris Williamson 53:55 I feel like you're a guy that went away for a decade to some mountaintop kung fu retreat and learned a bunch of really dangerous martial arts where you can kill a guy with one touch, and I'm now asking, "Okay, so how do I kill guys with one touch?" And you're saying, "Well, what I'm here to do is I'm here to warn people about the one-touch death move."

Adam Aleksic 54:17 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 54:17 That's exactly what it feels like.

Adam Aleksic 54:18 I think we should be immensely critical of these platforms, and I'm a big believer that the medium is the message, that the way we consume media strongly affects everything we understand.

Chris Williamson 54:27 Hmm.

Adam Aleksic 54:27 That algorithms are uniquely constraining our language to this bottleneck we've described.

Chris Williamson 54:31 Hmm.

Adam Aleksic 54:32 That they are shaping our expression, and if they're doing it to our language, that's one thing, because I do think language, again, is this tool that's sort of neutral. But they're also doing it to our ideas, our discussion, our greater sense of reality. There are certain biases that get coded into the algorithm that then get perpetuated. We see the same thing happening with AI. There's a bottleneck again there. What kind of language goes in? What kind of, uh, language is reinforced into the model? And then what kind of language goes out? Nothing is neutral when it's happening through a tech intermediary that's trying to make money off

Adam Aleksic 54:58 of you.

Chris Williamson 54:58 Okay. Talk to me about what AI is doing to language.

Adam Aleksic 55:01 You know about the word delve?

Chris Williamson 55:03 Delve? To sort of jump into.

Adam Aleksic 55:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 55:05 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 55:06 So we have studies indicating that since ChatGPT came out, usage of the word delve has spiked 1,000% since before 2022.

Chris Williamson 55:16 Why does ChatGPT like delve?

Adam Aleksic 55:18 So ChatGPT uses the word delve 10 times more than regular because there is a bias in the reinforcement learning process, which is when the words get trained into the model. So one, there's a few things going on here. One, the reinforcement workers are in Nigeria and Kenya, where they do actually say delve at higher rates, but still not that high, and that's partially they're rewarding words that they're familiar with.

Chris Williamson 55:37 Okay.

Adam Aleksic 55:38 Two, delve is a Latin word, and we know that ChatGPT exhibits a Latin-based bias over Germanic words because, again-

Chris Williamson 55:44 It's Latin supremacy

Adam Aleksic 55:45 ... it, it's prestige. It's like you think Latin sounds fancier than Germanic words. Like, Germanic words are basic ones like the, but, and, whatever, and then Latin words... Or dig in is a Germanic word versus delve is a, is a Latin-derived word.

Chris Williamson 55:55 Right.

Adam Aleksic 55:56 And it sounds fancier to say the Latin word. And because these models are trained to sound like they know what they're talking about, they're going to use more of the Romance language stuff. They, they're trained to sound confident and incisive and sycophantic, and they will use certain words that-Perpetuate that, and then that gets reinforced into the model. So all this stuff happens, and when you're a reinforcement learner clicking thr- reinforcement worker clicking through what kind of words are okay and not okay, you don't really catch a small discrepancy like that, that delve is showing up a little bit more. So it accidentally gets reinforced into the model, and then ChatGPT starts spitting out the word delve more. And now we have evidence in the past few years that humans, in our spontaneous spoken conversation, are also starting to use the word delve more.

Chris Williamson 56:35 So the creature that programmed the AI is being programmed by the AI?

Adam Aleksic 56:39 We are now being trained by ChatGPT to use different language.

Chris Williamson 56:43 In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the US. They are the driving force behind Gymshark and Skims and Alo and Neutonic, which is why I partnered with them because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms, and with Shop Pay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Basically, you didn't get into business to learn how to code or build a website or deal with the inventory stuff, bullshit on the back end. You just want to get down to creating and promoting an awesome product, and Shopify takes all of the mess off your hands and allows you to focus on the job you actually came here to do, designing and selling the thing that you love. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use with Neutonic with Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com/modernwisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com/modernwisdom. Wasn't there a study done on British politicians and what they'd been saying-

Adam Aleksic 57:48 Yes, and the, and the House of Chambers are now saying, "I rise to speak" instead of... I, I don't know what the norm was before, but they're using a US, uh, colloquial term, uh, which is clearly indicating that their speeches are written by ChatGPT. We've seen academic research papers that probably 13% of all research abstracts are written, aided by some kind of large language model. You can't trust any source whether you think it's... So it's not even you're being directly influenced by the AI. It's you're being influenced by somebody else who was influenced by AI. You're reading a text that you don't know was written by AI.

Chris Williamson 58:16 Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Aleksic 58:17 All of LinkedIn is already like, I can't tell whether it's AI or these people genuinely think like this, but they use speak in the bullet points that it's not just X, it's Y. That's the negative parallelism, which also sounds, again, it... Things that are sound incisive are reinforced into the model, and then they end up affecting our actual speech patterns.

Chris Williamson 58:32 But what it also does is it means that you need to counter-signal away from it. So I'm gonna draw an analogy to Ozempic. Ozempic at the moment means that people can more easily lose weight. That means that losing weight naturally becomes less high status. Something... Remember when Adele lost weight in the before times, prehistoric.

Adam Aleksic 58:49 Right.

Chris Williamson 58:49 Just did it with calorie deficit and cardio or whatever she did.

Adam Aleksic 58:53 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:53 You lose weight now, whether you did use Ozempic or not, you're gonna be accused of having used it. So we are now already seeing counter-signaling away from the-

Adam Aleksic 59:02 Little-

Chris Williamson 59:02 What's it, double dash?

Adam Aleksic 59:03 A little tasteful chub is back in.

Chris Williamson 59:04 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It will be soon. Aha, it's nice. A natural, I see.

Adam Aleksic 59:09 [laughs] Right.

Chris Williamson 59:09 Um, what's the double dash thing that ChatGPT got?

Adam Aleksic 59:11 The em dash.

Chris Williamson 59:12 Em dash. No one can use... So I have a couple of friends-

Adam Aleksic 59:15 No, I'm, I'm gonna hold onto it, uh, for, as a writer. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 59:18 Well, I think you have a competitive advantage because no one's gonna assume that you-

Adam Aleksic 59:23 Well, there's also-

Chris Williamson 59:23 ... would be using ChatGPT

Adam Aleksic 59:23 ... there is a way that ChatGPT uses the em dash to segment thoughts in those negative parallelisms and so on, and there's a way that a good writer can use an em dash because ChatGPT speaks predictably, and a good writer will speak unpredictably.

Chris Williamson 59:36 Yeah. I'm friends with some very good writers, and they love the use of the em dash, and now they-

Adam Aleksic 59:42 Yeah

Chris Williamson 59:42 ... feel like they need to counter-signal away from it. Nobody wants to use the word delve.

Adam Aleksic 59:46 Exactly.

Chris Williamson 59:46 I gotta imagine-

Adam Aleksic 59:46 I don't, I don't use the word delve. Yeah

Chris Williamson 59:47 ... we're gonna feel or we're gonna see the word delve drop off because people are gonna be terrified that even if that was the word I wanted to... Dig in.

Adam Aleksic 59:56 Here's the thing, delve is merely the poster child for a much broader phenomenon.

Chris Williamson 1:00:02 [laughs]

Adam Aleksic 1:00:04 We got commendable, we got meticulous, crucial, potential, significant. All of these words, all kind of Latin derived, are also increasing with ChatGPT. But we're only pointing to delve and the em dash because those are the easiest things to pick up on.

Chris Williamson 1:00:15 Right.

Adam Aleksic 1:00:15 There are so many smaller things, and I'm more concerned about the insidious things. Again, not linguistically. I think language should serve as a signal for this broader thing that's happening. If it's a re-reflection of our reality, that means our reality is being shaped by ChatGPT, and I don't think there's anything inherently harmful to the word commendable or meticulous. But the fact that we are also proven to be saying those words more after ChatGPT has been proven to say those words more means that its reality is influencing our reality.

Chris Williamson 1:00:38 Hmm.

Adam Aleksic 1:00:39 And I'm now concerned, what if there's a political bias, a gender bias, a whatever, racial bi- Like, all this stuff gets coded into the model. And I mean, Elon Musk doesn't even hide that he, like, tweaks Grok to, like, align with his political preferences, so he's being obvious about it. The other, uh, platforms aren't being obvious about it. Maybe Anthropic is doing a better job than, than, uh, um, OpenAI. But they're all kind of still trying to make money at the end of the day.

Chris Williamson 1:01:01 Hmm.

Adam Aleksic 1:01:01 And, uh, they're all doing something that's not aligned with human priorities.

Chris Williamson 1:01:06 Well, I had Tristan Harris, Center for Humane Technology.

Adam Aleksic 1:01:10 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:10 He was set there yesterday, and, um, he brought up this great point about Anthropic, which is from the outside, you know, the, the, they're, uh, doing things that seem from an optics perspective to be really great. But every single platform has the exact same-

Adam Aleksic 1:01:25 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 1:01:27 ... uh, outcome desire, which is the models need to be trained very quickly, as fast as possible to become as good as possible. And if they're not, then we're gonna fall behind.

Adam Aleksic 1:01:34 I-

Chris Williamson 1:01:34 So window dress it-

Adam Aleksic 1:01:35 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:01:35 ... however you want. The, the big mover is what's the alignment problem looking like? What's the level of safety?

Adam Aleksic 1:01:42 I do think we should at least praise Anthropic for thinking more about alignment and safety than other, uh, platforms, but that does not mean we should become complacent. And we should always be questioning who is the intermediary between us and our speech because there is something affecting when you go through a medium, something is constrained. That's why I say the medium is the message.

Chris Williamson 1:02:00 Hmm. Okay. What... Is there gonna be linguistic chaos then as AI begins to kick off more and more?

Adam Aleksic 1:02:08 We're just kind of gonna get a little more homogenized probably. But then hopefully we'll see a new outgrowth.

Chris Williamson 1:02:11 You're already more homogenized-

Adam Aleksic 1:02:13 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:02:13 ... you said through social media.

Adam Aleksic 1:02:14 We have a language dying out every two weeks. That's the stat. There's 7,000 languages in the world, and it's predicted that most of them are gonna die out by the end of the century.

Chris Williamson 1:02:20 It's a mass extinction event.

Adam Aleksic 1:02:22 It is. It is. And so we're losing all this beautiful stuff, all these ways of expression. I love th- this book Braiding Sweetgrass. In it there's, uh, the Potawatomi expression, to be a Saturday. It expresses Saturday as a verb, that you could embody a Saturday as a verb. And this is not a concept that we really think about or express in English. And I'm not saying it's impossible to imagine this, but it's a way of expressing the world that is lost when a language dies out. And you have all these languages dying out-

Chris Williamson 1:02:46 Mm

Adam Aleksic 1:02:46 ... that homogenizes and constrains the creative potential for expression. Not saying that we couldn't think of these thoughts, but the options, the affordances are less there than they otherwise

Adam Aleksic 1:02:55 would be.

Chris Williamson 1:02:56 Why do some languages seem to have words that represent much more niche long sentence descriptions than others? So for instance, in, uh, sch- schadenfreude is like an obvious example. But, uh, what is the German word that describes the sensation of migratory birds when they are stopped from migrating?

Adam Aleksic 1:03:17 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:03:17 Do you know this word?

Adam Aleksic 1:03:18 No, that's incredible.

Chris Williamson 1:03:19 It, it's, it's a kind of restless, a desire to fly and the restriction from being allowed to fly that is felt by a migratory bird.

Adam Aleksic 1:03:30 Sounds like a human instinct as well. I k-

Chris Williamson 1:03:31 Uh, uh, very much so

Adam Aleksic 1:03:32 ... I, I resonate with that, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:03:32 Very much so. Yeah, ex- ah, God, I, I should be adventuring or traveling or something and I'm being restricted from doing it.

Adam Aleksic 1:03:38 Kinda like wanderlust, but-

Chris Williamson 1:03:39 To, to a degree

Adam Aleksic 1:03:40 ... yeah. Well, so there's, there's a difference between, uh, agglutinative languages and inflection languages, where, um, in a agglutinative language like Turkish, uh, and German does this by just tacking words together. You can just add things onto other things. And then there's inflection where you change the form of the word. So English, like you can, I guess, add S to the end of a word. But, like, a lot of stuff, like, I don't know, um, changes based on the form of the word. In, in Latin, in a, in French, uh, you'll conjugate. You'll do all these things where it, um, yeah, uh, you're changing the form rather than adding on. But there's different ways you can do language.

Chris Williamson 1:04:16 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:04:17 Are you more concerned about social media or AI for what it's doing to linguistics?

Adam Aleksic 1:04:21 Social media for sure. Because whatever's happening with AI, it then just immediately gets captured by social media. And what I'm concerned about here is that they replicate the natural way that ideas diffuse through populations. Idea is kind of like a virus.

Chris Williamson 1:04:32 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 1:04:32 It starts in a host. It can infect other hosts. You had Malcolm Gladwell on, I think, talk about this.

Chris Williamson 1:04:37 Mm-hmm.

Adam Aleksic 1:04:37 Um, it's a little reductive to just say that, but I think it's a good model for understanding the way information scatters is kind of like in a virus network. Like, it's sort of like a disease. And algorithms have created a replication of natural human social networks that operates faster, that connects more nodes than ever before, which means these ideas can spread faster than ever before. What that means is also misinformation can spread faster than ever before. More information is not necessarily always a good thing because now you can be flooded with information, and, uh, it's called flooding the zone, where you, you lose track of what's the real information am- among all the false information.

Chris Williamson 1:05:13 Mm-hmm.

Adam Aleksic 1:05:14 Um, you are being bombarded with ideas from people who have an agenda. There are meme coin traders and polymarket traders who are trying to make a quick buck off of pushing certain words or ideas because now we're betting on ideas, and we're betting on, uh, there are coins attached to which m- m- idea goes viral. So if an idea goes more viral-

Chris Williamson 1:05:33 There's incentives now

Adam Aleksic 1:05:33 ... you make money off it. So now there's a financial incentive to push certain ideas. And so I think we should remain highly skeptical of everything. Maybe we should touch grass more. But at the very least, we should be highly inquisitive of what the medium is doing to us and how it's affecting our, uh, communication.

Chris Williamson 1:05:46 Is there a science to meme language?

Adam Aleksic 1:05:49 It's called memetics, yeah. Um, but there definitely are people studying how these networks work.

Chris Williamson 1:05:56 Mm. And then presumably reverse engineering it. I mean, I'm, I, I have to wonder, it, it would take a long time. There was a, an interesting, a successful attempt by Gymshark to do a grassroots social media campaign promoting, uh, Francis Ngannou. So they used a burner account on Reddit on maybe the UFC subreddit to post a video supposedly of CCTV of Francis Ngannou trying to get into maybe a dry cleaners, and the door was locked. And he goes like this, and goes pink, and the whole door just smashes and breaks.

Adam Aleksic 1:06:33 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:33 The entire thing was contr- the whole thing was constructed. They filmed it. It wasn't CCTV. It was fake glass. Francis Ngannou was wearing a Gymshark logo here. Burner account on Reddit. Nothing. Just left it. Whoom. Just completely set ablaze.

Adam Aleksic 1:06:50 Wow.

Chris Williamson 1:06:50 So I wonder, okay, that's, you know, people that are quite close to the ground floor, but they're not, they don't have the resources of a country. If you did, the ability to shape language, to think what sort of words do we want people using? We can't podcast it top-down 'cause people are gonna push back if they feel like they're being... We've watched too much of Adam's stuff. We know that the, the people are gonna push back if they feel like this word's being forced on them. How can we... Maybe we need to get on 4chan. Maybe we can start to-

Adam Aleksic 1:07:18 Definitely don't. No, I, I think, um, get offline as much as possible while remaining aware and appraised of what's happening online. Because I do think we should, like, be aware that even if we are offline, this stuff will still affect us to some degree. Like, the, if your friends are adopting ideas that come from the algorithm and you're offline and you're interacting with your friends, you're still gonna be adopting the algorithm ideas without even knowing it. So we should be highly media literate, knowing that our information is probably being manipulated by these actors who have vested interests in giving us bad information, and this effect is only going to be amplified as more and more people figure out how to exploit the information ecosystem. If I'm giving you a warning, it's this one. It's that, uh, I see in real time how our language is being shaped by malicious actors, that these, uh, there are companies and foreign governments with dashboards, um, on tracking populations and how clusters of similar ideas are represented in the social media space. And they know how to seed ideas in ways that spread better. Um, and they're trying to do that. And maybe they're not being fully successful, but they're-Are active, like, information warfare campaigns occurring

Adam Aleksic 1:08:20 as we speak

Chris Williamson 1:08:21 How does living inside of these algorithmic constraint systems change what type of thoughts we can easily express? Because this isn't just the language that we're using. The whole point of "1984," sorry to go to... We, we, there was no way we were gonna be able to get through this podcast without talking about "1984."

Adam Aleksic 1:08:36 Yeah, we had to get there.

Chris Williamson 1:08:37 Um, feeding back up into your capacity to think.

Adam Aleksic 1:08:42 Yeah. It's a controversial question in linguistics. Um, it's generally accepted that language is not the only thing determining thought, right? But it might have an influence on it. That's called linguistic relativism. Um, I don't think we're gonna end up in a "1984" scenario. If anything, I think people should pay more attention to Brave New World, the Aldous Huxley novel, where we're entertaining ourselves and don't, aren't even aware that we're in a dictatorship because we're too busy consuming content and, and drugs.

Chris Williamson 1:09:05 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 1:09:05 Um, but I, I don't think language can truly be constrained. I, I wrote my book on AlgoSpeak on how, um, words emerge in response to censorships. The stuff I said about the ice emoji, or just words like on a live where you can't say kill. We come up with ways. We are incredibly tenacious as human beings to express ourselves and say what we want to say.

Chris Williamson 1:09:24 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 1:09:24 That does not mean that some things aren't harder to say.

Chris Williamson 1:09:27 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 1:09:27 That certain ideas aren't more constrained, and it... There's a idea called the Overton window, which is the range of acceptable discourse in a society that, right, back in the day, like gay marriage was unthinkable, right? And then the Overton window moved, and all of a sudden it was okay. Um, and that was a, maybe, I, I think a positive change. But there's also the Overton window is moving toward looksmaxing. There's way more interest in this stuff right now. So the... But the, this window moves with the amount of represented discourse that we think. It's a consensus reality. It's what we think other people are thinking and what is acceptable. So if a certain kind of discourse, like back in the day, more and more people started saying, there was the gay liberation movement. More and more people started saying maybe gay people should have rights. That moved the window in the direction of gay marriage. Now there's more and more people saying, like, uh, replicating these alt-right ideas, replicating that, uh, idea that, um, looksmaxing is a good way to, you know, maybe you should be on Ozempic, all this stuff. Um, and that moves the window toward that range of discourse. So while your thoughts are not necessarily being constrained, and everybody still can think for themselves and can still find ways to express themselves, the consensus reality is kind of moving. Um, and that's something maybe I'm concerned about apart from the linguistic level.

Chris Williamson 1:10:41 If you had to give a steel man argument that Gen Z is really different, what do you think it would be in, in the context of how every generation thinks that-

Adam Aleksic 1:10:52 I'm gonna push back on the-

Chris Williamson 1:10:52 ... the kids are destroying the language

Adam Aleksic 1:10:53 ... concept of, uh, Gen Z. Yes, every generation thinks that kids are, um, destroying language, and somehow the older people die out and the kids grow up, and then now we're pissed at the younger kids.

Chris Williamson 1:11:03 And we run it back.

Adam Aleksic 1:11:04 And we continue.

Chris Williamson 1:11:04 Is there, is there a steel man argument for how Gen Z could be different?

Adam Aleksic 1:11:07 I don't think Gen Z exists. I don't think generations exist. Um, these are weird social constructs that we believe exist. So-

Chris Williamson 1:11:13 This is your one touch death move.

Adam Aleksic 1:11:14 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:11:15 Like fucking-

Adam Aleksic 1:11:16 No, wait

Chris Williamson 1:11:16 ... you're like trying to catch smoke here. Come the fuck back.

Adam Aleksic 1:11:18 I'm, I'm not denying that there's older and younger people, that there's familial generations, right? That there's, uh... But we only started this idea of a broad social cohort, like a generation, with the lost generation after World War I really, and then we had the silent generation. We had the GI generation with World War II. Then we have baby boomers, and then we're like, "All right. We don't know what to call the next people, so Gen X." X means we don't know. Um-

Chris Williamson 1:11:38 Lazy

Adam Aleksic 1:11:38 ... and then it's like, okay, millennial is good enough, and then it's like, well, we're two after Gen X. We'll call it Gen Z. Well, we ran out of the alphabet. We'll call it Gen Alpha. That's literally... It's, it's all made up, and it started in the early 1900s, but it's become more and more salient, and I... This is, if anything, a new category that can be used to sell you as a consumer demographic, that can commodify you, that they, uh, have manufactured Gen Z as a concept, that now we're also performing what it means to be Gen Z. Whereas a person in the 1800s wouldn't perform for their social cohort because there was no social cohort. It's simply you are the age that you are, and now, now I'm supposed to, as a older Gen Z person, have more in touch with a younger Gen Z person than a, a younger millennial.

Chris Williamson 1:12:15 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 1:12:15 But really I f- I feel much more in common with younger millennials. Um, it's all, it's all made up.

Chris Williamson 1:12:20 Oh, so-

Adam Aleksic 1:12:20 And yet there's this idea now of being Gen Z that is forced upon us and is part of this broader social media tendency to label e- every part of us as human beings and put us into buckets that actually do not describe us perfectly.

Chris Williamson 1:12:33 This self-branding is constraining because it's giving you another role to perform to.

Adam Aleksic 1:12:37 A label is kind of a violent thing to impose on someone because now it's you either have to identify with or against the label. Once it's out there, it's out there, and now I need to choose whether I feel more like Gen Z or not like Gen Z, and now I need to choose whether I'm cottagecore or not cottagecore, whether I'm a Swiftie or not a Swiftie, and all these things kind of combine, and now I'm, all of a sudden, I'm a cottagecore Swiftie Gen Z whatever. Uh-

Chris Williamson 1:12:56 Me too.

Adam Aleksic 1:12:56 But really at the end of the day, I'm just a, a... Every person is a unique human being in the same way that we have a unique idiolect, a unique dialect that is our own way of speaking. We have a unique identity. Um, as a linguist, I have one word tattooed on my body. It's the word umwelt. It means the world as it is perceived by a particular person, and I really like this idea that we all really see the world in a completely unique way, and yet when we put ourselves into buckets and when we pretend that we are, it's nice to feel like we are like social- other people, and it's a, a useful thing to have a category to kind of signal toward your identity.

Chris Williamson 1:13:27 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 1:13:27 But you are completely unique, and what social media wants to do is put you into small, small buckets, yes, but buckets that really make you interchangeable with other people.

Chris Williamson 1:13:36 Before we continue, as you're probably aware, I'm not a massive drinker, at least not anymore. But even if you too are not drinking, sometimes you just want something cold, frosty, and tasty without the fear of a hangover the next day, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. Thank you very much. Their non-alcoholic brews taste just as good as the real thing. They've got IPAs, hazy goldens. They're so good that you'll forget that there's no alcohol in them until you wake up the next day feeling fantastic. It means that you can enjoy the ritual without the wreckage. No hangover, no 3:00 AM panic, no wasted Sunday recovering from Saturday. That is why I partnered with them. You can find Athletic Brewing Co.'s best-selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you, or best option, you can get the full variety pack of four flavors shipped right to your door. Right now, get up to 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom, using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM.At checkout. Near beer. Terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company. Fit for all

Chris Williamson 1:14:40 times. It's a strange tension because on one hand we all want to be individuals, but on another hand, we all want to belong. [laughs] And-

Adam Aleksic 1:14:48 Classic, yeah, dichotomy. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:14:50 Yeah. And I can see-

Adam Aleksic 1:14:51 Two wolves inside of you.

Chris Williamson 1:14:52 Yeah, of course. And the, the... There's a really interesting bit of evolutionary anthropology that's looking at the, uh, desire for autonomy and the desire for support and kinship, and this is what you see. A, a good way to look at this would be a child's life cycle. So unbelievable need for kinship up until 11, 12, then you start to get a bit rebellious, and then by 13, 14, 15-

Adam Aleksic 1:15:19 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 1:15:19 ... you don't want anything to do with your parents. Your mum and dad-

Adam Aleksic 1:15:21 That's, that's also when you're coming up with new slang.

Chris Williamson 1:15:23 Yeah. Well, of course. It's also the most... You know the memory bump effect? You familiar with this?

Adam Aleksic 1:15:28 No. What's this?

Chris Williamson 1:15:28 Uh, I think it's the rem- reminiscence effect, which is the language, uh, the, uh, music and movies that you grow up listening to between the ages of about 12 and 16 tend to be locked in as what you like for the rest of your life.

Adam Aleksic 1:15:42 They're, they're formative. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:15:43 Very formative. Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 1:15:43 That makes a lot of sense.

Chris Williamson 1:15:44 And, um, you know, every, uh-

Adam Aleksic 1:15:47 Not to say that we can't keep developing new tastes and-

Chris Williamson 1:15:49 Of course

Adam Aleksic 1:15:50 ... I, of course, strive for that

Chris Williamson 1:15:50 ... people find new stuff, new bands, new movies that they like.

Adam Aleksic 1:15:52 But it does, it does affect you in that Umwelt sense, that this made a huge impression on you at this particular... And you can't ever separate that from who you will be in the future.

Chris Williamson 1:16:00 Super formative.

Adam Aleksic 1:16:01 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:16:01 And to think, okay, well, what's going on at 13, 14, 15 while sexuality's coming online?

Adam Aleksic 1:16:07 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:16:08 What is the one thing that you really, really, really do not want to do? Have sex with someone that's part of your family. So my family's gonna suck. I'm gonna... I... Well, stay away. I want, I want my own independence.

Adam Aleksic 1:16:18 [laughs] I didn't expect that to go in the answer. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's interesting.

Chris Williamson 1:16:21 It's incest avoidance.

Adam Aleksic 1:16:21 I think, uh... Well, I mean, that's one framework. I always... I tend to think that, uh, any one framework is always, like, reductive, but it is, like, part... Like, in the same way that-

Chris Williamson 1:16:28 Constraining element

Adam Aleksic 1:16:29 ... like, I think, for example, Freud, he was kind of cooking with some stuff, but you think about the world just in a Freudian lens, or, uh, honestly, the looks maxers are kind of right that attractiveness matters. But if you're looking at it just through that one lens-

Chris Williamson 1:16:40 Right

Adam Aleksic 1:16:40 ... the framework now constrains you. Now you're looking at the world reductively. We should adopt as many frameworks as possible. Sorry, I went on a tangent there.

Chris Williamson 1:16:46 No, but if you have too many frameworks-

Adam Aleksic 1:16:47 Um, mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 1:16:47 ... it becomes chaotic, right? And that, that also becomes, I think, difficult sometimes to amalgamate together.

Adam Aleksic 1:16:52 My general worldview, I think, is characterized by trying to understand as many frameworks as possible, and they all kind of point in at the-

Chris Williamson 1:16:58 Oh, you're a framework maximalist.

Adam Aleksic 1:17:00 Maybe. Maybe. Because they all point at this indescribable whole. Um, we can never know, you know, what unnamed Dao or whatever the middle thing is that we're trying to figure out-

Chris Williamson 1:17:10 Yeah, the third attractor

Adam Aleksic 1:17:10 ... what reality is. Yeah. Uh, but everything else is signaling or pointing at it. And if you broaden your worldview as much as possible and consume as many different forms of media as possible... I do think maybe we should be on algorithms a little bit. We should also be reading regular news, and we should also remember that's biased, and we should remember... We should, like, be consuming as many different forms of media as possible, and we should be consuming as many different ideas and perspectives as possible because that helps us better understand what's really going on rather than this biased, uh... We're always looking at the world through, like, a confirmation bias, sampling bias. Like, uh, everything's filtered through the algorithm. Everything's filtered through AI. And if you try to just consume your worldview through that, you're gonna be limited. So consume other things as well. Touch grass, you know, and then maybe we can build a better, better picture of what the real world is.

Chris Williamson 1:17:55 Poly-consumption, poly-framework approach.

Adam Aleksic 1:17:57 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:17:58 I, I like it and I agree. Um, for me to say the Westmark effect, which is w- what we do for incest avoidance and, and the fact that you- sexuality's coming online, you don't want to be around your kinship-

Adam Aleksic 1:18:07 No, it's interesting. I'm with it

Chris Williamson 1:18:08 ... I'm not saying-

Adam Aleksic 1:18:08 Yeah, yeah

Chris Williamson 1:18:08 ... I'm not saying that that is the one ring to rule them all. But what I do mean, and I, I totally agree, is that there's another incentive that exists online, which is if someone plants a flag in the ground and says, "I have a single explanatory framework that solves all of the questions that you've got"-

Adam Aleksic 1:18:28 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:18:28 ... that person sounds... That-

Adam Aleksic 1:18:30 That's so satisfying

Chris Williamson 1:18:30 ... level of conviction-

Adam Aleksic 1:18:31 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:18:32 ... is so sexy.

Adam Aleksic 1:18:33 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:18:33 And I, I wonder whether... It, it takes an awful lot of conscious de-training to look at someone that's ardent and completely unforgiving in their worldview and say, "Huh, I don't know if I'm that confident about anything. I don't know if I'm that confident about my own-

Adam Aleksic 1:18:49 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:18:49 ... birth date." So how is this person about this really con... Well, we know why the war in Ukraine started. We know why the war in Ukraine started.

Adam Aleksic 1:18:57 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:18:57 We know exactly what's going on there.

Adam Aleksic 1:18:58 Every war has, like, 100 different reasons behind it. And all those-

Chris Williamson 1:19:01 That's interesting

Adam Aleksic 1:19:01 ... reasons could be equally, well, valid, you know? But like-

Chris Williamson 1:19:04 But we know what's going on with the looks maxing community.

Adam Aleksic 1:19:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:19:06 Oh, that's interesting. And you... What you state as an absolute fact that is incontrovertible and uni-dimensionally explained, has a completely opposing guy with the opposite perspective, which is also uni-dimensionally explained. You go, "Okay, h-

Adam Aleksic 1:19:22 Weird how that happens. Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:19:23 ... comport, comport those two for me, because both of you are saying that you are completely right and that the other person is therefore implicitly completely wrong."

Adam Aleksic 1:19:31 Yeah. No, I think it's, it's reductive to look at the world through one set of glasses. Um, and-

Chris Williamson 1:19:36 It's sexiness. The sexiness of the conviction

Adam Aleksic 1:19:39 ... the human, the human brain thinks in terms of simple stories. We like connecting the dots from point A to point B. Like, for etymology, we want to think that a word comes from an older word and evolved into a newer word. Really, it was evolving through an aesthetic lens. It was evolving through a social context. There was another, maybe a word C that affected the trajectory of word A as it-

Chris Williamson 1:19:57 Mm

Adam Aleksic 1:19:57 ... evolved into word B. Um, it's never one simple story. I see this with language, but also the world is this hugely complex, interrelated thing. And to re- call one framework the framework is ignoring all the different ways the world could exist, ignoring the fact that a Saturday could be a verb instead of a noun.

Chris Williamson 1:20:15 I feel like a Saturday sometimes.

Adam Aleksic 1:20:17 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:20:17 You're quite a, you're quite a Saturday guy.

Adam Aleksic 1:20:19 I'm a Saturday guy.

Chris Williamson 1:20:19 You're a big,

Chris Williamson 1:20:20 big Saturday guy. All right. I want to play, uh, surprising word histories with you.

Adam Aleksic 1:20:23 Hit me with it.

Chris Williamson 1:20:24 Okay. Muscle.

Adam Aleksic 1:20:26 Comes from the Latin word for mouse, little mouse. Musculus.

Chris Williamson 1:20:29 Why?

Adam Aleksic 1:20:30 It, like, looks like a mouse when it moves under your skin, right?

Chris Williamson 1:20:33 [laughs]

Adam Aleksic 1:20:34 They call me the Etymology Nerd for a reason. I'm, I'm gonna flop the rest of them.

Chris Williamson 1:20:37 I can't wait. This is gonna be so good. Salary.

Adam Aleksic 1:20:40 Salary is, uh, s- the Latin word for salt. They would pay wages in, uh, salt, sal

Chris Williamson 1:20:44 [laughs] All right, next one. Uh, assassin.

Adam Aleksic 1:20:50 Uh, that comes from Arabic hashishin. It meant marijuana, uh, hashish consu- consumer, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:20:55 [laughs]

Adam Aleksic 1:20:56 'Cause, uh, they would like... It was a sect.

Chris Williamson 1:20:58 You're scaring, you're scaring me.

Adam Aleksic 1:20:59 It was a sect in, like, Persia that would just, like, get high and, like, uh, kill people. I don't know what they were doing, but that was kind of the mythology of it.

Chris Williamson 1:21:05 The Nizari Isma- Ismaili sect.

Adam Aleksic 1:21:08 All right. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:21:09 You're terrifying.

Adam Aleksic 1:21:10 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:21:12 Candidate.

Adam Aleksic 1:21:13 Uh, from Latin candidus, uh, white-robed. So, uh, candidate, that was, uh... Like, white was associated with purity, so it was like you were vying for a pure and noble office if you wore white.

Chris Williamson 1:21:24 Okay. Uh, did the girl... Did the word girl originally mean a young woman, or did it once mean something completely different?

Adam Aleksic 1:21:31 I think it was, like, a gender-neutral term. It could mean boy. Um, but it-

Chris Williamson 1:21:34 Correct, and any young person

Adam Aleksic 1:21:35 ... it meant child, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:21:35 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, how did silly go from meaning blessed to meaning stupid?

Adam Aleksic 1:21:41 [laughs] Well, in the same sense that, like, awful and awesome both share that root aw. Like, so when something has just an emotional valence to it, like a quality to it, it can move easily between different boundaries.

Chris Williamson 1:21:53 Mm-hmm.

Adam Aleksic 1:21:53 But, uh, what, what did you have there?

Chris Williamson 1:21:55 Uh, the Old English of selig meant blessed or fortunate, and over centuries it drifted through innocent, naive, and then-

Adam Aleksic 1:22:02 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:22:02 ... foolish. Just-

Adam Aleksic 1:22:03 It's the, the semantic drift is, uh, yeah, how words evolve over time, and it is, like, terrible again. Uh, and all the, like, words that describe this shaking feeling you get can really range easily between, uh, uh, the same root as terrific, terrible and terrific.

Chris Williamson 1:22:19 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 1:22:19 Terrifying. Um, so it can quickly move between different types of emotions because how do we even describe what's going on here, you know?

Chris Williamson 1:22:25 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 1:22:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:22:25 With difficulty.

Adam Aleksic 1:22:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:22:27 Ancient Aztec word for avocado. What else did it mean?

Adam Aleksic 1:22:30 Oh, ahuacatl, and, uh, it had a secondary definition of testicle.

Chris Williamson 1:22:33 [laughs] Um-

Adam Aleksic 1:22:36 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:22:37 ... nightmare. Is there anything interesting about nightmare?

Adam Aleksic 1:22:41 Is that mare like horse? Is there... Well, there's, like, the idea of, like, a, a incubus horse that attacked people. I'm not sure if that's the, what the-

Chris Williamson 1:22:48 It's a Germanic demon-

Adam Aleksic 1:22:50 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:22:50 ... that was a mare that sat on sleepers chests.

Adam Aleksic 1:22:53 Yeah, so it was a horse? Or-

Chris Williamson 1:22:54 Yes

Adam Aleksic 1:22:55 ... uh, okay.

Chris Williamson 1:22:55 But it was m- the mare came from a Germanic demon.

Adam Aleksic 1:22:59 Okay.

Chris Williamson 1:22:59 So mare was a Germanic-

Adam Aleksic 1:23:00 Fascinating. Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:23:00 So it might have actually been-

Adam Aleksic 1:23:02 A demon in the night

Chris Williamson 1:23:03 ... a demon that then became the name for a horse-

Adam Aleksic 1:23:05 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:23:05 ... and the night horse.

Adam Aleksic 1:23:08 Wow. No, I have to look into the mare thing. That's fascinating, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:23:10 Uh, goodbye, with God be with you. Um, penguin. Why does the word penguin probably mean white head even though penguins don't have white heads?

Adam Aleksic 1:23:21 I don't know penguin. Please educate me.

Chris Williamson 1:23:22 Okay, so there's a Welsh word, which is pen, P-E-N-G-W-Y-N, pengwyn, right? Which-

Adam Aleksic 1:23:32 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:23:32 ... looks fucking Welsh as shit.

Adam Aleksic 1:23:34 No way would I have expected that to be Welsh.

Chris Williamson 1:23:36 Uh-

Adam Aleksic 1:23:36 I mean, I'm, like, it's a weird-ass word, I believe it. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:23:38 And it originally referred to the great auk. It's, it wasn't referring to penguins.

Adam Aleksic 1:23:42 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:23:43 But it-

Adam Aleksic 1:23:43 Obviously not

Chris Williamson 1:23:44 ... then got repurposed.

Adam Aleksic 1:23:45 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:23:45 Um, orange.

Adam Aleksic 1:23:48 Uh, well, it comes from the Sanskrit, uh, word for orange tree, but it moved through, um, like, Arabic naranga, sa- same as, like, the Spanish word.

Chris Williamson 1:23:57 Mm-hmm.

Adam Aleksic 1:23:58 Um, and then, uh, I think people kept saying an orange, and the an got cut off because it turned into, like, [laughs] a, a orange versus an orange.

Chris Williamson 1:24:08 Yes.

Adam Aleksic 1:24:08 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:24:10 Dude, you won. Whatever the fuck that was, you won.

Adam Aleksic 1:24:13 [laughs] I'm glad I qualified.

Chris Williamson 1:24:13 You, you, you won. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A orange-

Adam Aleksic 1:24:16 Right

Chris Williamson 1:24:17 ... to an orange.

Adam Aleksic 1:24:18 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:24:19 Bro, unbelievable. Yeah, I, um... Look, from between you and Mark, uh, Forsyth, it is so fucking fun. You must have so much fun doing this stuff.

Adam Aleksic 1:24:28 I, I-

Chris Williamson 1:24:28 I think it's great

Adam Aleksic 1:24:29 ... got into etymology for the fun facts. That was the... And then, uh, you know, I came to see this broader-

Chris Williamson 1:24:33 Terrifying in a quiz team.

Adam Aleksic 1:24:35 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:24:35 Terrifying in a quiz team.

Chris Williamson 1:24:37 Um, you played with inventing languages.

Adam Aleksic 1:24:39 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:24:40 What did you learn?

Adam Aleksic 1:24:41 So the whole thing I was saying about languages, like, being a different way to express reality, I think a really fun way to play with that is building your own language. So the, uh, we see this in movies, like, there's a Dothraki language and a Klingon language, and people have made fictional languages before. This is a practice called conlanging, constructed language. Um, and you know, Esperanto is another famous one where they tried to make that a global language and it didn't, didn't really work out, but they built it from scratch and were, like, trying to make this a thing.

Chris Williamson 1:25:05 Is this sort of an evidence-based language that was gonna be more precise and easy to use?

Adam Aleksic 1:25:09 I think maybe you're thinking about Ithkuil or something, or maybe Esperanto is, is just meant to be, like, an easier language to use. That was the idea.

Chris Williamson 1:25:17 Right.

Adam Aleksic 1:25:18 Of course, that, what that means is, like, a strange concept. Um, and it's still, like, European based.

Chris Williamson 1:25:22 Surely there are, there are languages that have more and less linear rules around it.

Adam Aleksic 1:25:28 Different types of rules, but there's always a complexity to it because, I mean, humans gotta express themselves in many different ways. Um, I, I think it's really hard to make a claim about one language is more complex than another or something like that. Um, but you can talk about one dimensional language. You can adopt one framework and then talk about it. Um, anyway, um, I, uh, I dabbled in conlanging f- first in-

Chris Williamson 1:25:48 What, what?

Adam Aleksic 1:25:48 Conlanging, which is constructed language, uh, creation.

Chris Williamson 1:25:51 Okay, thank you.

Adam Aleksic 1:25:52 Uh, sorry. Um, and then I studied, uh, linguistics in college, and I took a conlanging class at MIT, actually, that kind of got me into it. Um, but I was sort of dabbling before that. F- for the conlanging class-

Chris Williamson 1:26:03 Conlanging dabbler.

Adam Aleksic 1:26:03 Yeah, I've dabbled.

Chris Williamson 1:26:04 Yeah.

Adam Aleksic 1:26:04 And then, uh, a little more professionally, um, [laughs] I, uh, uh, for the conlanging class at MIT, I built a dolphin language, and that was my first, like, moment going viral on TikTok, was me presenting my dolphin language, where, like, the word for shark, for example, is [clicks] . [laughs] And, but-

Chris Williamson 1:26:19 [laughs]

Adam Aleksic 1:26:20 The idea is what if you can create a language out of just whistles and clicks? And that's kind of cool to play around with the phonological format. So I played around with a lot of other animal languages. I made a bird language that's just whistled. Um, there are actual whistled registers of languages, uh, around the world.

Chris Williamson 1:26:35 I saw... Didn't AI reverse engineer what birds are saying? Did you see this?

Adam Aleksic 1:26:39 I, I mean, I don't know what that means at all. Animal communication is just like not a decodable thing in the way human communication is. So sup-

Chris Williamson 1:26:45 So i- supposedly

Adam Aleksic 1:26:46 ... I'm hesitant to say

Chris Williamson 1:26:47 I, I, I, I'm probably wrong, but I'm pretty sure that I saw, um, AI has analyzed tens of thousands of birdsong sounds and have decoded-

Adam Aleksic 1:26:55 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:26:55 ... some of the communication. Another thing, I don't know whether this is true or not. I remember hearing that most birdsong is actually just territorial marking.

Adam Aleksic 1:27:02 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:27:03 So it's basically birds saying-

Adam Aleksic 1:27:05 Or a mating call or something like that

Chris Williamson 1:27:06 ... birds saying-

Adam Aleksic 1:27:06 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:27:06 ... fuck off-

Adam Aleksic 1:27:07 Right

Chris Williamson 1:27:07 ... at varying... Oh, here we are.

Adam Aleksic 1:27:09 Um, no, 100% there's stuff being done, uh, with bird- Cornell's doing amazing bird stuff. They have a bird-

Chris Williamson 1:27:14 Okay

Adam Aleksic 1:27:14 ... tracking app that they actually use to, uh, follow bird migrations, and there's cool stuff being done with language and, uh... But the thing is, when we talk about like animal language, there's good research being done with whale communication too. Um, the people who are talking about this, if you're a linguist talking about it, you don't understand how the whales work, and if you're a, a whale researcher talking about it, you don't understand how language works.

Chris Williamson 1:27:31 Right.

Adam Aleksic 1:27:31 Um, or you can, might have an idea, but it's, I don't think it's correct to really talk about animals having language as much as communication, and of course, they have communication. Their only way of signaling things. But when you're a whale, you're also using things like, uh, your body rolling o- over in water. Dolphins have sonar. Like bats have echo- Like this is crazy that they have all this stuff going on that humans don't, and this can all be a part of the communicative context.

Chris Williamson 1:27:53 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 1:27:54 And it's not like maybe the language has an abstract meaning in the way that humans do. Maybe it simply signals, uh, a, a presence and a certain, uh, emotional intent in a moment in time, but it's also contextual, and the other bird might have a different interpretation. I, like, uh, I don't know. Language is a very difficult thing that I'm not even sure how to define it.

Chris Williamson 1:28:12 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 1:28:13 Uh, anybody who, who do says they know what language is-

Chris Williamson 1:28:14 After a decade of study, I'm so glad to hear you say that.

Adam Aleksic 1:28:17 [laughs] Anybody who says they know what language is is telling you a framework, right? It's, uh...

Chris Williamson 1:28:22 Do you know the story of how the QWERTY keyboard came to be?

Adam Aleksic 1:28:25 Well, weren't the typewriters jamming with the... They had the ABC, like, and they tried it out and didn't, uh... They tried the Dvorak keyboard, um, but QWERTY was the one that prevented the typewriters from, from jamming together.

Chris Williamson 1:28:36 Bingo.

Adam Aleksic 1:28:36 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:28:37 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they put the most used letters out on the edges so that they weren't next to each other so that you wouldn't trigger them because both of them would fire-

Adam Aleksic 1:28:43 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:28:43 ... at the same time. But that is purposefully built to be slow.

Adam Aleksic 1:28:47 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:28:47 QWERTY keyboard is designed to be inefficient.

Adam Aleksic 1:28:50 Well, once we get attuned to it and, like tr- like, it does move quickly, I, I think.

Chris Williamson 1:28:54 But mo- but there are even mo-

Adam Aleksic 1:28:55 It was slow relative to when we thought the alphabet had to show up in an order on a keyboard.

Chris Williamson 1:28:59 But like for like, if you train people on other keyboard arrangements, they can be up to 30% to 50% faster.

Adam Aleksic 1:29:05 Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:29:06 So I wondered, as you were talking about they tried to put Esperanza in, that didn't work, so on and so forth. If there was a world in which you could design a language from scratch-

Adam Aleksic 1:29:16 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:29:16 ... to be as... Uh, the only goal of language, unlike with typing, which is an intermediary process between things that are not being changed, is not just to be efficient, right?

Adam Aleksic 1:29:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:29:27 It's to be beautiful, it's to be il- illustrative.

Adam Aleksic 1:29:29 I think, uh-

Chris Williamson 1:29:29 It's to communicate sentiment

Adam Aleksic 1:29:30 ... that is a big flaw of how people talk about language, and that's how the algorithmists want you to talk about language, that it's just information bits transferred per second, and that there's a certain amount of information that's communicated, and that's the goal of language, to just get information across. That's something that can now be categorized and commodified. Um, I think ri- language is also this ritualistic bonding thing between people. Small talk, for example, like when you say the goodbye at the end of a phone call-

Chris Williamson 1:29:52 Mm

Adam Aleksic 1:29:52 ... why are you doing that? You're not communicating anything. You could just hang up, and that would comm-

Chris Williamson 1:29:55 I'm gonna go... I'm gonna... All my phone calls are gonna be done movie style now. All right. Bink.

Adam Aleksic 1:30:00 But you do it because it helps establish social ties with the other person, and that's kind of a beautiful thing that-

Chris Williamson 1:30:04 Courtesy.

Adam Aleksic 1:30:05 Yeah. You're building this thing with another person, and there is an element of humanity in the small talk and in the saying goodbye at the end of the phone call, which maybe not good for an algorithm. Maybe you don't, like, end an algorithmic video by saying goodbye, whatever. But, um, it, it does add something importantly human to communication. Anyway, that being said, I think what you were getting at is do... Can different languages have different information transferred? Um, as humans, we have a certain maybe capacity for processing information, and it... What's funny is that even a, a language like Japanese has way more syllables per second than Thai, and yet they will still transfer about the same bits per second as each other.

Chris Williamson 1:30:42 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 1:30:42 Because Thai is a more inflectional language. As I mentioned, they, like, uh, have more tones. Uh, they build on the individual syllable more, and Japan is more likely to add syllables. But at the end of the day, they'll speak slowly in Thai, and they'll drag out their word more, but they're saying the exact same thing that a Japanese speaker is saying with three syllables.

Chris Williamson 1:31:01 Unbelievable. I wonder, I, I, I wonder what it would be like to try and design a very efficient language.

Adam Aleksic 1:31:08 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:31:08 Be so interesting to hear.

Adam Aleksic 1:31:09 They've tried this.

Chris Williamson 1:31:10 How can we communicate-

Adam Aleksic 1:31:11 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:31:11 ... the most content in the smallest number of syllables or words?

Adam Aleksic 1:31:15 Yeah, I, I, I mentioned this language Ithkuil, which is a hypothesized conlang, and conlangs are great for really just exploring the boundaries of what language could be, and that's kind of what I was trying to say with the, the dolphin thing. You can just explore the sounds. Sorry, digression. Um, Ithkuil is a language that creates, like, the most information transferred, and it's, like, a highly dense language carrying many different meanings in a s- you know? And, um, it's impossible for a human to learn. I mean, no, no, no native speakers of Ithkuil exist because at the end of the day, we are humans using language to connect with other humans.

Chris Williamson 1:31:48 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 1:31:48 And we're using it in a way that we can understand and describe our reality, and that's, that's how it works. You-

Chris Williamson 1:31:53 I'm, I'm sure you saw that-

Adam Aleksic 1:31:54 Yeah, I'm sure you can create a, a robot language that works more efficiently, but...

Chris Williamson 1:31:57 I was gonna say, I'm sure that you saw that conversation between two AIs that realized-

Adam Aleksic 1:32:01 Mm

Chris Williamson 1:32:01 ... that they were both AIs, and they said-

Adam Aleksic 1:32:02 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:32:02 ... "Should we switch to bleeps and bloops? And it's way quicker for us to be able to communicate like that." I don't know whether that was actually fake or real.

Adam Aleksic 1:32:09 I'm not, I'm not sure about that either. But it is true that computers do not think about language in the way we do. In fact, I would be very hesitant to say ChatGPT even speaks English rather than it's just predicting tokens based on a statistical model of what English should be.

Chris Williamson 1:32:23 Mm.

Adam Aleksic 1:32:24 Um, what it's actually doing is when you input something in English, it converts those words into tokens, which is like a segment of the word. So it breaks up the words into smaller parts, pairs those parts with numbers. These numbers turn into, like, coordinates, kind of like on a, um, Cartesian plane, like X, Y axis, but, like, way more dimensions. So X, Y, Z, uh, uh, and-To like th- thousands of dimensions. Um, then it ends up as like a data point called an embedding, and this embedding is like the representation of what you said, right? And then that gets processed through these neural networks, um, and they figure out through previous learning things and previous ways they've understood embeddings, how they can predict the next token output. So then they create an output token, and then that's translated back into language. And so all this is happening between you saying something and ChatGPT responding with something. I think that's very important to understand because there's a huge misconception that it's speaking English. Along the whole way that I- I s- spoke about language getting broken down, turned into another, uh, numbers, broken back up into these tokens, and then turned back into language, a lot of meaning can get lost, and that's where something like delve could get over-represented. That's where something could happen where our natural way of speaking gets improperly encoded, the training process w- does not work correctly, and then it ends up speaking this misaligned version of language.

Chris Williamson 1:33:50 I wonder what's gonna happen. I wonder what the next few years are gonna have in store for language because you have got bigger influences and bigger broadcasts than ever before. So is this-- would you say that this is gonna be the time in human history where language is potentially going to change the most rapidly?

Adam Aleksic 1:34:05 I think so. I think it's a hard thing-

Chris Williamson 1:34:07 Diffusion

Adam Aleksic 1:34:07 ... it's a hard thing to measure what it even is for language to change 'cause as I mentioned, I don't even know what language is. So if I'm starting with my research question, realistically, no, we don't know what language is. It's all made up and, and because of the thing I mentioned where everybody speaks their own kind of version of language, and the thing that we call a language is really just this weird spectrum of people talking that sound similar to each other and it's like, where do you draw the category here?

Chris Williamson 1:34:27 Mm-hmm.

Adam Aleksic 1:34:27 Um, of course, ChatGPT is trained on a corpus of the English language, which is made up in the same way Gen Z is made up. It's like a, a category that we think is a thing. And then that category is this weird homogenized thing already that there is an English language. There's a way you speak and a way I speak that are slightly different from each other, and that we can find this shared reality between ourselves. But then when our collective shared reality is fed into the chatbot, that then creates its own reality based on the shared reality and outputs this-- what we end up with is just something that's not really a f- a way that you speak. It's not a way that I speak. It's not a way that anybody speaks. It's a mathematical representation of speech.

Chris Williamson 1:35:01 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:35:02 Dude, you rule. Your work's so interesting. Where should people go if they wanna keep up to date with everything you got going on? Let's bring this one home.

Adam Aleksic 1:35:07 I think the most important thing is I try to use my media to push people [chuckles] to more longer form stuff. So I got a Substack, Etymology Nerd, and I got a, um, a book called Algo Speak about how social media is changing language. But I am on social media platforms as Etymology Nerd as well.

Chris Williamson 1:35:21 All right. Goodbye, everybody. Click.

Adam Aleksic 1:35:23 Thank you for having me. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:35:25 Dude, so fucking good.

Adam Aleksic 1:35:27 That was a lot of fun. Wow, I feel like we covered so much ground.

Chris Williamson 1:35:29 You rule. That was great. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, YouTube knows who you are deeply. It thinks you're gonna like this one even more. Go on, press it.