Modern WisdomTHEY’RE BRAINWASHING YOU! (& other secrets that made you click) - Etymology Nerd
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
100 min read · 20,337 words- 0:00 – 2:31
The Truth Behind “Word of the Year”
- CWChris Williamson
Six seven was voted word of the year in 2025 from dictionary.com. Is that cheating? Not even a word. Doesn't mean anything.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs] Yes.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
I don't believe that it doesn't mean anything.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Ah, okay. So it's a story about... It's, it's a meta word in a way.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah, exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
It's, it's all a... It's a knowing wink.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- AAAdam Aleksic
By uttering six seven, you're playing into the panopticon.
- CWChris Williamson
Rage bait was Oxford's 2025 word of the year.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
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."
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- 2:31 – 3:27
Is TikTok Rewiring How We Speak?
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
It's fine.
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
It's still Twitter.
- AAAdam Aleksic
I know.
- CWChris Williamson
It's still Twitter.
- AAAdam Aleksic
I'm, I'm holding onto it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- 3:27 – 5:34
Do Social Platforms Create Their Own Dialects?
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Um, and-
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
It also tells you something about the person using them. It's, uh, an identifier-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yes
- CWChris Williamson
... of in-group, uh, uh, belonging.
- AAAdam Aleksic
100%. Language is a tool of identity, and when you use a word, you are signaling that you're a part of this cohort.
- 5:34 – 13:47
The Hidden Formula Behind Influencer Language
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Hang on. Pause. What?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Which included the accent
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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.
- CWChris Williamson
It's a long and illustrious history of influencers speaking in this way.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Um, and that's only one type of influencer accent. I obviously speak-
- CWChris Williamson
Pause on that one.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
That's exactly it. In linguistics this is-
- CWChris Williamson
Holy fuck!
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah. It's called floor holding. It's an actual like strategy that people use before, uh, you know social media.
- CWChris Williamson
In debate.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
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...
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah. That's good.
- CWChris Williamson
Really what we need to consider is... Oh, oh, oh, I'm waiting. So the use of silence-
- AAAdam Aleksic
We want to know what comes next.
- CWChris Williamson
Bingo.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, it's a handoff. There you go.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah, yeah.
- 13:47 – 17:01
Why MrBeast Changes His Voice
- CWChris Williamson
What else? So we've had cozy lifestyle lady. We've had educational influencer man.
- AAAdam Aleksic
There's-
- CWChris Williamson
Mr. Beast
- AAAdam Aleksic
... there's a beast in the room. Yeah, I was about to say. [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Very good. What, what's happening with this MrBeast's accent?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AAAdam Aleksic
... even as he does it, you know?
- CWChris Williamson
So it's excitement, loudness. What else?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
It's like a magician. You just wanna keep the attention going.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Definitely
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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.
- CWChris Williamson
They dance around for ages.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-"
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- AAAdam Aleksic
"... this shell here." Um, but I think there's something of an important parallel between that-
- CWChris Williamson
That's good
- AAAdam Aleksic
... visual way that you get clickbaited and the auditory and linguistic way that happens as well.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. How so?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AAAdam Aleksic
... YouTube videos.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. The payoff's held until the end.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah.
- 17:01 – 18:33
Internet Subcultures and Their Unique Languages
- CWChris Williamson
What other subcultures online do you think are particularly interesting linguistically?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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]
- CWChris Williamson
What made 4chan such a useful incubator for language?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
No one's posting a selfie though, right? To say, "This is me. I am one of us."
- AAAdam Aleksic
In the sense that language is identity.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
100%, these people on 4chan are also trying to build a shared identity for themselves and-
- CWChris Williamson
Self-branding, belonging
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm, yeah, that's true. Well, I am. I have been for eight years now. I am podcast maxing. Uh-What
- 18:33 – 21:12
How Newscasters Engineered Their Signature Voice
- CWChris Williamson
about newscasters? How come they speak so strangely?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
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- 21:12 – 22:38
Why Sports Commentators Sound So Distinct
- CWChris Williamson
What about sports commentators? Because they're doing something similar but a little bit distinct and different.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah. If, uh, news broadcasters are the equivalent of educational influencers, then sports commentators are kind of closer to MrBeast.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
No way, because it would just waste screen time.
- AAAdam Aleksic
It would waste screen time if-
- CWChris Williamson
You don't need to hear you-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah, exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
"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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
So it's performing the idea of a phone call while not actually doing phone call as we actually do it.
- CWChris Williamson
I never thought about that. Holy shit. Uh, but sterilizing language too much obviously puts
- 22:38 – 26:44
Is Distribution Is the Key to Going Viral?
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
That's funny.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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]
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs] I think so.
- CWChris Williamson
How would you do that? What's-
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, interesting.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- AAAdam Aleksic
But now the media's ecosystem is oversaturated, and the TED Talks have way fewer views than they used to-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AAAdam Aleksic
... because they don't do the same function that they did in the early internet.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Oh, yeah. Right
- CWChris Williamson
... 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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Just-
- CWChris Williamson
Which means that you're gonna go less viral.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Which means there's less of an incentive for you to keep doing your content.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
So sometimes it's just watching a movie is-
- 26:44 – 33:38
Can You Hear Sexuality in Someone’s Voice?
- CWChris Williamson
What about the gay male accent? What's going on there?
- AAAdam Aleksic
[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.
- CWChris Williamson
What like?
- AAAdam Aleksic
Oh, like slay, serve, queen, cooked, ate, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Cooked is gay?
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah, I, I'm pretty sure that come... Well, there's cooking and cooked, which come from different sources.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Cooking is sports slang. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, playing well.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... but in a manner that somebody who isn't a part of that culture would identify as feminine.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. What like?
- AAAdam Aleksic
Well, using certain slang words.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Like, uh, uh, I'm thinking about like, I don't know, cottaging in Britain, but when homosexuality was illegal.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Do you know what capoeira is?
- AAAdam Aleksic
It sounds British.
- CWChris Williamson
It's a Brazilian martial art.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Br- Brazilian is what I meant, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... 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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Wow, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
That's amazing.
- 33:38 – 40:32
Are Lesbian Accents Hard to Identify?
- CWChris Williamson
What about lesbian accents?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AAAdam Aleksic
... but the studies aren't there to fully explain it.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
And gay women aren't trying to be men 'cause that wouldn't attract any of the gay women.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Performing the idea of being a gay man and-
- AAAdam Aleksic
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?
- CWChris Williamson
Can you... [laughs] I need you to dissect. Can you blow that apart for me?
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
It's really cool. I'm not entirely sure what you mean.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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]
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Right
- CWChris Williamson
... 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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Oh, that's so interesting
- CWChris Williamson
... 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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
That's really interesting.
- CWChris Williamson
And, um-
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
... 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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Luke Skywalker looks maxed.
- CWChris Williamson
Luke Skywalker absolutely mogs, dude.
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs]
- 40:32 – 43:37
Should We Replace Words With Emojis?
- CWChris Williamson
What about emojis? Because they're kind of like language and picture, I guess. They feel like modern hieroglyphics.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
I saw a court case where they were trying to determine what this emoji meant. Had it have... Did it imply-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Was it the farmer in, uh, Canada?
- CWChris Williamson
What was this one?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
There's a long established history of emojis in court cases.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Right. Well, there's a few things going on. Yeah. What was the one you were thinking about?
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Well, that's the thing that, um-
- CWChris Williamson
So it's so fluid
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, you shouldn't use the laughing emoji.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, that's kind of cringe because-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Unless you're trying to like signal boomer.
- CWChris Williamson
Correct. Yes.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the horseshoe has come all the way back around-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Right
- CWChris Williamson
... again.
- AAAdam Aleksic
You can post-ironically use it, I think.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Okay, yeah, we're in the post cry laughing face world.
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs] Right.
- 43:37 – 45:26
The Surprising Evolution of Etymology
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
So it's describing reality, and then it's communicating that reality.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
If our reality changes, yeah, language will change as a result-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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-
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
God be with you. And then, yeah, contracted to goodbye, and then eventually you can truncate it to just bye.
- CWChris Williamson
Bye.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. What's that called? That's a contraction?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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,
- 45:26 – 47:10
Are Young People Driving Language Change?
- AAAdam Aleksic
living thing.
- CWChris Williamson
You mentioned, uh, uh, Black people, gay people, cool people, normal people. Young people, how much-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Mm
- CWChris Williamson
... 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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
And you don't wanna sound like your mother. You wanna sound like your, your peers.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. How much of the changes in language is just because kids want to differatie- differentiate themselves from their parents?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AAAdam Aleksic
... um, that comes from younger people. So all the video game terms we see in, uh, bleeding into mainstream English, um, NPC, skill issue-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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.
- 47:10 – 48:34
Why We Reject Forced Language
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Stop trying to make fetch happen
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
So they're not forcing the word. They're merely, once a word has been used around for long enough, they legitimize it.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- 48:34 – 52:14
Where Do Filler Words Come From?
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
It's a holding pattern.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah, yeah. It's the floral thing again.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Like implies it doesn't have to be 100% accurate, but-
- CWChris Williamson
It's a self-analogy
- AAAdam Aleksic
... I was like this. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It's a self-simile. Yeah, yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
I was like, it's a self-simile. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Mark Forsyth
- CWChris Williamson
... Forsyth. Mark Forsyth.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah. That's the book that got me into etymology. I read-
- CWChris Williamson
No fucking way.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
No way.
- AAAdam Aleksic
So I do-
- CWChris Williamson
Did you read Elements of Eloquence as well?
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Right
- CWChris Williamson
... yep, yep, yep." It's that, it's foreplay and post-coital talking talk.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Exactly. No, I think we talked about floor holding, but you gotta take the floor in the first place.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Falling halfway through a sentence-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah
- 52:14 – 54:58
The Most Powerful Language Tricks Creators Use
- AAAdam Aleksic
the middle of a thought.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... what else are some good, uh, keyholes in the brain that you can latch into?
- AAAdam Aleksic
Uh, I'm trying less to provide advice to creators and more just get people aware of what creators are already doing to you.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, okay.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Everything is about attention.
- CWChris Williamson
You're like, you're like a public, public service announcement for creators.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
PSA.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Everybody's doing everything for your attention.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
There's several meta layers to everything we're saying.
- CWChris Williamson
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."
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
That's exactly what it feels like.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
That algorithms are uniquely constraining our language to this bottleneck we've described.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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
- 54:58 – 1:02:55
How AI is Changing the Way We Speak
- AAAdam Aleksic
of you.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Talk to me about what AI is doing to language.
- AAAdam Aleksic
You know about the word delve?
- CWChris Williamson
Delve? To sort of jump into.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
So we have studies indicating that since ChatGPT came out, usage of the word delve has spiked 1,000% since before 2022.
- CWChris Williamson
Why does ChatGPT like delve?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Two, delve is a Latin word, and we know that ChatGPT exhibits a Latin-based bias over Germanic words because, again-
- CWChris Williamson
It's Latin supremacy
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
So the creature that programmed the AI is being programmed by the AI?
- AAAdam Aleksic
We are now being trained by ChatGPT to use different language.
- CWChris Williamson
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- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
Just did it with calorie deficit and cardio or whatever she did.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Little-
- CWChris Williamson
What's it, double dash?
- AAAdam Aleksic
A little tasteful chub is back in.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It will be soon. Aha, it's nice. A natural, I see.
- 1:02:55 – 1:04:17
Can One Word Capture a Whole Idea?
- AAAdam Aleksic
would be.
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Do you know this word?
- AAAdam Aleksic
No, that's incredible.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Sounds like a human instinct as well. I k-
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, uh, very much so
- AAAdam Aleksic
... I, I resonate with that, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Very much so. Yeah, ex- ah, God, I, I should be adventuring or traveling or something and I'm being restricted from doing it.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Kinda like wanderlust, but-
- CWChris Williamson
To, to a degree
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- 1:04:17 – 1:08:20
Social Media vs AI: What’s Worse For Language Development?
- CWChris Williamson
Are you more concerned about social media or AI for what it's doing to linguistics?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
It starts in a host. It can infect other hosts. You had Malcolm Gladwell on, I think, talk about this.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
There's incentives now
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Is there a science to meme language?
- AAAdam Aleksic
It's called memetics, yeah. Um, but there definitely are people studying how these networks work.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Wow.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
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
- 1:08:20 – 1:10:41
How Language Shapes the Way We Think
- AAAdam Aleksic
as we speak
- CWChris Williamson
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."
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah, we had to get there.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, feeding back up into your capacity to think.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
That does not mean that some things aren't harder to say.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- 1:10:41 – 1:14:40
What It Really Means to Be Gen Z
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
I'm gonna push back on the-
- CWChris Williamson
... the kids are destroying the language
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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.
- CWChris Williamson
And we run it back.
- AAAdam Aleksic
And we continue.
- CWChris Williamson
Is there, is there a steel man argument for how Gen Z could be different?
- AAAdam Aleksic
I don't think Gen Z exists. I don't think generations exist. Um, these are weird social constructs that we believe exist. So-
- CWChris Williamson
This is your one touch death move.
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Like fucking-
- AAAdam Aleksic
No, wait
- CWChris Williamson
... you're like trying to catch smoke here. Come the fuck back.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Lazy
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
But really I f- I feel much more in common with younger millennials. Um, it's all, it's all made up.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, so-
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
This self-branding is constraining because it's giving you another role to perform to.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Me too.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 1:14:40 – 1:20:20
Why Teenagers Naturally Rebel
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Classic, yeah, dichotomy. [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. And I can see-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Two wolves inside of you.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Mm-hmm
- CWChris Williamson
... you don't want anything to do with your parents. Your mum and dad-
- AAAdam Aleksic
That's, that's also when you're coming up with new slang.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Well, of course. It's also the most... You know the memory bump effect? You familiar with this?
- AAAdam Aleksic
No. What's this?
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
They're, they're formative. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Very formative. Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
That makes a lot of sense.
- CWChris Williamson
And, um, you know, every, uh-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Not to say that we can't keep developing new tastes and-
- CWChris Williamson
Of course
- AAAdam Aleksic
... I, of course, strive for that
- CWChris Williamson
... people find new stuff, new bands, new movies that they like.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Super formative.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And to think, okay, well, what's going on at 13, 14, 15 while sexuality's coming online?
- AAAdam Aleksic
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs] I didn't expect that to go in the answer. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's interesting.
- CWChris Williamson
It's incest avoidance.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Constraining element
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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-
- 1:20:20 – 1:24:37
Rapid-Fire: The Origins of Everyday Words
- CWChris Williamson
big Saturday guy. All right. I want to play, uh, surprising word histories with you.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Hit me with it.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Muscle.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Comes from the Latin word for mouse, little mouse. Musculus.
- CWChris Williamson
Why?
- AAAdam Aleksic
It, like, looks like a mouse when it moves under your skin, right?
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- AAAdam Aleksic
They call me the Etymology Nerd for a reason. I'm, I'm gonna flop the rest of them.
- CWChris Williamson
I can't wait. This is gonna be so good. Salary.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Salary is, uh, s- the Latin word for salt. They would pay wages in, uh, salt, sal
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs] All right, next one. Uh, assassin.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Uh, that comes from Arabic hashishin. It meant marijuana, uh, hashish consu- consumer, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- AAAdam Aleksic
'Cause, uh, they would like... It was a sect.
- CWChris Williamson
You're scaring, you're scaring me.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
The Nizari Isma- Ismaili sect.
- AAAdam Aleksic
All right. [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
You're terrifying.
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Candidate.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Uh, did the girl... Did the word girl originally mean a young woman, or did it once mean something completely different?
- AAAdam Aleksic
I think it was, like, a gender-neutral term. It could mean boy. Um, but it-
- CWChris Williamson
Correct, and any young person
- AAAdam Aleksic
... it meant child, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, how did silly go from meaning blessed to meaning stupid?
- AAAdam Aleksic
[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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
But, uh, what, what did you have there?
- 1:24:37 – 1:28:21
The Power of Creating Your Own Language
- CWChris Williamson
Um, you played with inventing languages.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
What did you learn?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Is this sort of an evidence-based language that was gonna be more precise and easy to use?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Of course, that, what that means is, like, a strange concept. Um, and it's still, like, European based.
- CWChris Williamson
Surely there are, there are languages that have more and less linear rules around it.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
What, what?
- AAAdam Aleksic
Conlanging, which is constructed language, uh, creation.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, thank you.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
Conlanging dabbler.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah, I've dabbled.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
I saw... Didn't AI reverse engineer what birds are saying? Did you see this?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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-
- CWChris Williamson
So i- supposedly
- AAAdam Aleksic
... I'm hesitant to say
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... 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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
So it's basically birds saying-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Or a mating call or something like that
- 1:28:21 – 1:31:57
Was QWERTY Designed to Be Inefficient?
- CWChris Williamson
Do you know the story of how the QWERTY keyboard came to be?
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Bingo.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... at the same time. But that is purposefully built to be slow.
- AAAdam Aleksic
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
QWERTY keyboard is designed to be inefficient.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Well, once we get attuned to it and, like tr- like, it does move quickly, I, I think.
- CWChris Williamson
But mo- but there are even mo-
- AAAdam Aleksic
It was slow relative to when we thought the alphabet had to show up in an order on a keyboard.
- CWChris Williamson
But like for like, if you train people on other keyboard arrangements, they can be up to 30% to 50% faster.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... 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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It's to be beautiful, it's to be il- illustrative.
- AAAdam Aleksic
I think, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
It's to communicate sentiment
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- AAAdam Aleksic
... why are you doing that? You're not communicating anything. You could just hang up, and that would comm-
- CWChris Williamson
I'm gonna go... I'm gonna... All my phone calls are gonna be done movie style now. All right. Bink.
- AAAdam Aleksic
But you do it because it helps establish social ties with the other person, and that's kind of a beautiful thing that-
- CWChris Williamson
Courtesy.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- 1:31:57 – 1:33:49
Does ChatGPT Actually Speak English?
- CWChris Williamson
I was gonna say, I'm sure that you saw that conversation between two AIs that realized-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Mm
- CWChris Williamson
... that they were both AIs, and they said-
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... "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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- 1:33:49 – 1:35:02
Is Language Evolving Faster Than Ever?
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- AAAdam Aleksic
I think so. I think it's a hard thing-
- CWChris Williamson
Diffusion
- AAAdam Aleksic
... 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?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- 1:35:02 – 1:35:43
Where to Find Adam
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- AAAdam Aleksic
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.
- CWChris Williamson
All right. Goodbye, everybody. Click.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Thank you for having me. [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Dude, so fucking good.
- AAAdam Aleksic
That was a lot of fun. Wow, I feel like we covered so much ground.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
Episode duration: 1:35:43
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