 So Jeffrey, this is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of origin of the species. It's a little too late for us. If you're really smart, do something in your 50th year that it's significant so that you can do that simultaneously. Do words and languages evolve like species do? You know, it's a fascinating question, a comparison that people have been exploring for a long time. Darwin himself was very much interested in language change and then historians aren't sure whether he had actually read the work of a historical linguist like Franz Bopp, if you'll cast your mind back, who about a generation earlier had published on the historical evolution of Indo-European and then maybe Bopp himself was influenced by Linnaeus and so it becomes one of those historical... I'm an engineer. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. But it's fascinating grounds for comparison because on the one hand, you think, well, language... I mean, it's the Lamarckian system, right? Language is something we do pass on. We acquire and pass on. If I grow up speaking Danish and then my kids learn English, they pass on English. We're not bound to the language of our parents. On the other hand, there are resemblances in the way languages split off into new families and new languages. In fact, some people have looked at developments in evolutionary theory for very precise models of how language changes. There's a recent article in Science, for example, which was a theory of punctuated equilibrium in language, the idea being that just before languages split into each other, there's this sudden increase in the number of new words that they form. So they've been very profitable ways of thinking about the similarities and differences between these two species. But it's not exactly predictive, yeah. No, no. And of course, one thing about language is that unlike species, which really are... You have a sense that species are really out there, the difference between one language... But between saying, speaking of one language and two languages, people say, well, if they're mutually intelligible or not. But you often have one language defined over varieties that are actually quite unintelligible. It comprehends varieties from Cantonese to Mandarin that are more different than Romanian and Portuguese. On the other hand, you'll have two languages like Danish and Norwegian and Dutch and Afrikaans. Everybody says, or now Serbian Croatian, where everybody says, well, these are two languages. But actually, they're as close as New York speech and Virginia speech. So the line between languages isn't a natural line in the way the line between species. People have said that the difference between a language and a dialect is that a language is a dialect with a Navy. I see. I see. It's like a college with a football team. It's different than the college is without. I think what's interesting to me is that I just got back from the AAAS meeting in Chicago and they had a whole session on the evolution and study of sign languages all over the world. And they were talking about how they start and they stop, you just get any group of people. And if in your family you develop these signs, you'll use those signs for the rest of your life and you move into, say, a group home or you go to college, then you'll adapt, but you tend to go back to your own. And then some of the, if you graduate and they're continuing with those and things come along like iPods and all that, then the sign language will get richer so that when the alumni return, they can't speak the language of the old. And yet, do we think that those kind of languages are the same as the kind of languages that we know that we speak with words? They're remarkably similar. I mean, obviously a language that's produced with one's hands and gestures is not the same as a language that's produced with this book. But they're remarkably similar, even down to the structure, the way pronouns work in those languages or the way grammatical structures and tenses and aspect and other features of the grammatical system of the language work. They're extraordinarily alike. And what that suggests is that, first of all, we should think of language as something more abstract than just speech. Language is this abstract capacity, which most of us, for various reasons, realize by making noises at one another, but which can equally well be realized in the form of gestures or in the case of writing by writing. So that's one thing we learned from the study of sign language that its language is way up here. And in fact, you get cases, for instance, of sign language aphasia and disorders when someone has a lesion in one of the hemispheres that are very like the disorders or quite analogous to the disorders you see in spoken language aphasia. Again, indicating that this language happens in the brain at a very abstract level and isn't directly connected to speech. We do know that language co-evolves with the times. And I understand that the American Dialect Society chose bailout as the 2008 word of the year. It really wasn't really so much up there before. But I was also looking back, and of course there are many organizations that choose their words of the year for different reasons. And the furthest back I could really get a digital technical term was, 1993 was information superhighway. Boy, did that start and end. Does anybody even say that anymore other than me right now? I've been looking at those sort of how far back. And the interesting way in which the history of the 20th century, one of the most interesting features of 20th century language in developed nations, languages like English and French and German and so on, is the way in which words have been born in the sciences and then sort of be dripped down the sides of the, trickled down the sides of the ivory tower into ordinary speech. I was looking the other day and said, well when did people start talking about feedback in and not as a technical term in cybernetics but just in the sense, give me your feedback on that. It was actually about the 40s already. People were using it in that way. And other terms, certainly information itself has become almost a prefix, from information overload to information science. Too much information. Too much information. The information age and information revolution. So these words do trickle down and also from the social sciences. I mean you look at all the words like peer group and status symbol and alienation and so on that are just part of the ordinary language of everyday life now but that had their origin in sociology. One more that I was just thinking about the other day because I was thinking of doing a fresh airpiece on it. I was looking to people who are really upset about the Madoff story of course. And they're searching their interlexicons for words they can use to denounce this character and so on. And you hear scoundrel and rogue and bum but actually the most frequent words that people use to describe them are psychopath and sociopath. Both of them fairly obscure words of psychological theory a couple of generations ago. So just another case where our ordinary language has been derived from science. Well that's interesting you say that about the psychology because in fact I remember I'm going to say like 15 years, 15 to 18 years ago people started saying passive aggressive so and so was passive aggressive. And I remember at the time saying oh did you see that that was passive aggressive and I was like oh my goodness that person has really figured out how to spot it because I always felt like a victim and then a couple of years went by and I figured the whole thing out. And so it's like it's not just the word the word represents behavior and so it brings not just a description of a sort of a one or two dimensional kind of thing it brings action in this into what people's behavior that we certainly didn't talk about prior to that. And a new way of understanding things you think of the way behaviors redefined so we used to have drunks now we have alcoholics now that isn't just a shifting of one word for another it's a very different understanding. But we didn't have alcoholics they were just people who did other things. But it's a different understanding of what causes this and how we should think about it and so forth. It's true that when these words slip into the language they tend to lose some of their scientific I mean I'm looking at the word sociopath for example it's applied to everybody from Obama to Bush to even Dick Cheney gets called. I say even because you look at the list of criteria for sociopath and one of them is supposed to be superficially charming. Why are we using this word Dick Cheney? So the words do acquire a different sense in the language but they do trickle down as I was saying. I was looking and it's been almost 15 years since the first time you came on the show which is hard to believe but it's been that long and one thing that has happened in your discovery and investigation of language that has certainly changed things is I very much remember the time you came in and you started saying and I was checking this on Google and I was counting words on Google suddenly Google was Jeffrey Nunberg's best friend. Well Google has, well Google and all of the data because it isn't just Google. All of the databases we have going back historically where we can go look at newspapers papers going back into the 18th century and English literature and have completely changed the way people do lexicography. You think of the Oxford English dictionary as the great achievement of 19th century of any lexicography. This vast book, thousands of volunteer readers sitting there transcribing citations on little slips of paper and sending them to Murray and his children in the back in a metal shed in the backyard of his house at Oxford where they were laboriously compiling them into this dictionary that at the end when it was finally prepared had used four million citations with more than a million actually cited in the dictionary. Extraordinary, it took decades, generations to finish this project. Well four million citations with a few strokes of key strokes I can pick up four million citations for the single word dictionary now. I can go back and I can look in the OED of the Oxford English dictionary and I can see, well, the first citation they have for this word is, let's say, 1960, the protest march in the Oxford English dictionary was first cited in 1961. Turns out if you do, now we have all these databases online you go back, it was actually used in 1912 by Gandhi in referring to the organization he was doing in South Africa. So over and over again you find these expressions, double standard we thought originated in the 50s actually goes back to the 1920s. So the people who are word lovers and who make these dictionaries and so on have completely revised the way we think about the, particularly the recent history of English because we have all these databases available. And it really brings home how much we've handed down language between us in all these generations. Right, and you can also look on Google and watch these words suddenly explode into... Like truthiness. Like truthiness, right? One day there's nothing all of a sudden. There's truthiness. Well that's an interesting thing because when I say technology it's a very broad definition as if God didn't make it, it's technology. And so media technology, some of it's digital, some of it's not but the thing is media technology has really become ubiquitous. And truthiness, if it wasn't for Stephen Colbert we wouldn't have truthiness having made that impact that quickly and meaning something. It's interesting, but the other side of media, the role of the media in language is that while the media create enormous numbers of words very quickly they also tend to evanesce very quickly. Words born on television tend not to live very long. And you think of the... Oh, I made a list of all the famous phrases that came from television. How many of them are still around? You bet your sweet Bippy and... It could be true. Yeah, but what was the Kojak line? Who loves you? Who loves you, baby? There's a long list of phrases that nobody ever uses. The only one... Be me up, Scotty. It's about the only one that's still in this language. I was going to say, when I was looking on the internet for these words of the year, one of them was not. Right. So the media create all these words. They go off in the atmosphere and they rarely survive. When the show goes into reruns the words tend to vanish. They jump to shark. Exactly. Now, I was looking desperately for how science could affect things. Because of Darwin, I was like, oh gee, maybe science has it. And the only thing I could pick up is in 2006 people started using the word you've been plutoed as in demoted. Right, right, right, right. But I couldn't find anything that really was, to this date, that really said that we understood something about science. That was more like the media event, if you will, driving it. As opposed to we have an appreciation for what's going on. I think science is always particularly modern technology. Modern now since the 19th century has had an effect on English and other languages. Building up ahead of steam or letting off steam or running on all cylinders or the point of no return, which is of course the point beyond which an airplane can't return to its home field or any number of these phrases that came from galvanized, for instance, a terrific word that we don't associate with its original meaning anymore, but it comes of course. And what is the original meaning? The original meaning is to use electrolysis, isn't it? You're the engineer. I'm testing him. I don't usually get to, you see. Yeah, the electrolysis, and then it makes the whole metal very strong. So it's galvanized and rigid. So there you are and you've been, we galvanized. I got it right. Strong things. But the interesting about computers is that it isn't simply a question of making these metaphors that are sometimes vivid and colorful but don't really instruct or shed any light on anything. With computers we tend to make these metaphors that actually reflected an understanding of what's going on inside us. So when you say, for instance, I can't multitask, you're modeling, or I'm having trouble multitasking, you're modeling your own mental processes on what you observe the computer doing. That's a very different way of using it. It's really interesting you would say that because computer scientists for many years did multitasking within operating systems, like from the mid-60s when the big, large operating systems first started coming on. And that was something that we understood and then for years you had paper and continuous paper and typewriters. And then we went to screens but they were mostly just letters. It wasn't until we got to the Macintosh and the work of Xerox PARC where suddenly you could have, can you imagine not having different applications all up on your screen now what we call that kind of a GUI interface, a graphical user interface. Once we had that and we had the sense that multiple things could go on and you could send something to a printer all of a sudden everybody really got the word we'd always used was multi-task. Now it may be simultaneously with something else but that's when I really saw people who never knew what the technical word meant suddenly got what the word meant and that would put us in the mid-1980s. I guess the mid-1980s, people used to talk back then about, don't give me a core dump, do you remember that? Yeah, they stopped saying that. That survived core memory by about 20 years. Core memory disappeared about 1975 and they were still talking about don't give me a core dump as late as 2000. Yes, same people are still saying it now and saying, don't listen to those. Now I've been saying these words of the year and one of the things I was interested in is a lot of times they reflect what just happened sometimes with the guidance of big media explosion or massive adaptation but in some cases they predated it like the word web was 1995 but it wasn't until 1997 that actually within a couple of weeks of each other both the White House and Mickey Mouse got their first website. So the real implementation and ubiquitous adaptation succeeded it by several years. So how would you say that word? That's also very interesting and again something that with the databases we can track now because it often happens that a word is first introduced I said this word goes back to 1912 but what matters really is not so much the first time the word occurs but the moment in which it catches on take a word like lifestyle. Lifestyle actually first entered the English language in 1929 it came from Adlerian psychology it was a technical term and was kind of around in the psychological literature for about four decades and then suddenly in 1969 if you plot the frequency of this word it's shot up a thousand fold because of Charles Rye's screening of America and so forth now does it matter when the word was first introduced? No, it's a word of the 60s and even if it existed before that that's when it caught on and I think this is the same with a lot of the language that we talk about it the important thing is at what moment did this become the hot expression not when was it first pronounced? Now we're at a time where all these people everybody's texting each other we got Twitter we got text messages and you know you say you for you and how does that change words as we know it I mean if the word of the year is you for Y-O-U is that just like a whole separate little language? You know it's interesting every technology that involves communication people have always looked to expecting it to work these profound changes in the English language I dug out an article about a year ago by a fellow named Conrad Swackhammer that was written in 1848 a few years after the telegraph had come and revolutionized communications was going to change the world people would be drawn closer there would be no nations anymore commerce would be entirely I mean people were saying about the telegraph with just as much reason as about the internet that this was going to fundamentally change the nature of human civilization and necessarily Swackhammer said just change the language as well efficient and brief and terse and no longer ornate and this is 50 years before Henry James is writing he was as it happens the first man to use the word telegraph to describe speech and language so you always have to be careful in predicting these changes and people have said about the texting for example that it's going to be the end of the English language the end of the sentences we know it and well speaking of end of sentences in telegraph I went this is back in the old days years and years and years ago when I was in college one summer all the college roommates we went to Hawaii for a week and if you're going to go to Hawaii for a week and you're in college on day six you've run out of money so on day five you know and this is before everybody all these credit cards and ATMs I mean you really were in another world and I remember calling my parents collect of course that's what you did and I said I need some money and my dad said well I said well $50 to get us all through the rest and he goes okay there's no reason for everybody not to wire all the parents I'll wire you the $50 and new girls come home and I said okay so when you wired money in those days you got a free 16 word telegraph I wish I'd kept it but it was like word word stop word word stop and I thought there's got to be an entire language of the telegram that rose and then went away it was for many years that the model of efficient speech and in fact some people have suggested that the the contractions of soviet speak sovnarkom and komsomol and someone all came from the telegraph and in turn gave rise to a certain kind of language of science which in turn gave rise to phrases like cyberspace and william gibson and so on that it all began with the telegraph so the telegraph had an enormous effect on the language it took a while and now people are looking to texting and expecting president obama has this black everything now I'm not so sure that the english language is going to change profoundly because kids who used to pass each other notes on paper in math class are now texting it with their thumbs and I don't know how big a difference that makes but but certainly people are looking to these technologies to change the language itself now what's interesting for me is that you and I both write commentary or reports for the radio and there are many times most of our writing we do for people to read which is different than writing for people to speak on the radio let's first of all reveal the technology background for five minutes there's a lot of wrappers and we actually have three transitions and so I write 625 words plus or minus 10 and break it into two transitions there and I know they'll be able I just go in and read that and they wrap it up into everything else you don't have a real hard line there don't they just sort of fit you into fresh air or do they three minutes 20 seconds give or take so you do I always try to take because three minutes 20 seconds is about what I got out of I have to write for it because everything else is wrapper on one end or the other and people who have written to a fixed limit whether it's for a three and a half minute radio piece or a 1500 word column or a 700 word column learn certain techniques of writing that are forced by the compact space of the medium one of the things I wonder is well now we've got the internet just roll on and on and on and on there's no when newspapers go online you can just keep writing there's no the print doesn't cost anything the paper doesn't cost anything you can keep going on and on where will people learn that discipline once they can continue so you pretty much know by the speed of how fast you read how many words you have to write for three minutes 20 seconds and you don't have any transitions just go straight through as you know radio is very interesting because it's really very different from writing for print I mean for one thing you come to the end of a column in a newspaper and you can see that we're getting near the end of the page maybe a little square just to indicate but on radio you have to sort of notice that the end is coming with a you have to have a snapper at the end people also I think they perceive it very differently when I was first doing fresh airpieces I used to do two or three at a time and then they would run them just I never knew when they were going to run them and people you know have they get into their cars and they turn on the radio and they listen and then they get out of the car and they forget everything it's like dreaming but they would I would see friends they say oh I heard you on the radio yesterday I said oh which piece was it and there'd be a long pause and they said well you know I was turning left off night on the Folsom you must you must get the studio I get it all the time it is interesting because you're speaking so if you're going to say a word you know if you're scanning a page and you know that there's a word that's kind of strange they'll stop and you'll look at the word well there's no stopping on the radio you know you've got to I always say if you run into a word you've never seen before we know your brain will go up to about a second and a quarter searching it's Rolodex in the old days searching it's Rolodex, searching it's database but do I know this word or a word like it and after a second and a quarter you'll just quit now what most people don't realize is that during that second and a quarter number one your hearing goes out you're engaged and once this word and then you're also engaged and you have no sense the time has passed you know it's like when you're having a good time time goes like that bad time it just goes so slow so if I say Jeffrey Nunberg never beats his dog and you know Jeffrey Nunberg and then you get in the beats his dog we used to get calls that you know I heard it on NPR Jeffrey Nunberg beats his dog and it's like we used to say that may be what you heard but that's not what was said we have to we have to take that the sense of that little bit of timing in there and if it's you find yourself saying it's if you write it you might say intel corporation ink you'd never say ink in the commentary so you got the reading and the writing and the motion the rhythm as you say a snapper at the end what's interesting is the way language as you do it adapts itself your language adapts itself to each of the media that you're using so that if you've done radio you start to talk for radio write for radio think for radio similarly for print and similarly for example for even for people who don't do journalism or radio work or something for email for example it's astonishing to me how quickly the conventions of email evolved if I can use that word so that people at a certain point realize well dear Jeff that's a little formal for email and that high became when I was when I was when email first hit France this was the early 90s for the minitel before the minitel just after the minitel people were doing email and I was in France and I had these keys on my keyboard bound to long expressions I would use it because they expected I dare to hope you will do me the courtesy of the honor of a reply IDT8 but quickly we realized that and sincerely and valedictions of that sort disappeared and cheers suddenly somebody pulled out of nowhere and put in there the whole form of the min you began to realize more than a screen you needed to break up rather than sending a long email you'd send three or four different messages with a screen full of information and all of that evolved almost instantaneously and became very universal and you can still tell if somebody's just come online if there are such left that they say dear so and so and they say sincerely and they write too many screen pulls and all those emails that they they're going to send us a million dollars from Nigeria those are all quite formal that's like a real letter that's out there now I had to I thought it was interesting for instance the when I did my book I took sections of interviews certainly not an interview but sections out of the biotech nation interviews because people were explaining biotech literally explaining science and my rules are you get one weird word in a segment after that you're out of there nobody's going to listen and so I forced all these people who really great scientists who really knew what they were talking about to what I would call cocktail party descriptions accurate it's very accurate and it worked when that went from speaking back to the written word I mean it was amazing how good it worked because people are actually I think this is just a thought of my part speaking directly they want you to understand and they know how to kind of drop down into I'm going to tell you this in words you know it's like there's like languages within languages and then I was thinking you know in your in your nuclear yeah I explained about nuclear where that came from well that is it's one of those interesting chivalrous that people have about people who say nuclear instead of nuclear I have to think now and of course Bush was taxed with ignorance and everything else for saying nuclear I tend to well Bush I don't know but I tend to to be less harsh on that pronunciation than other people do I think of what's the movie with Mia with Mia Farrell she's like a never marry a man who does not pronounce nuclear but it stands in for for a whole set of chivalrous that people have about language you have to say this word this way and so forth that's right and so in that end it's like we have you know I've got these people trying to explain this really simply on that end there are words that we may even mispronounce and we use all the time but we know what they mean no matter what they say it's like both pronunciations we get it they're the same word which is interesting now are we about ready for questions here I know people are great okay so you've got your your microphone right perfect and so if you just raise your hand Lisa will come down if you wonder about the audience they will all be here and please wait for the microphone to come that would be great right up in front we have one then you can be looking back and get ready here hi I just was wondering if you make distinctions by age for instance I notice a lot of language comes out of young people that I'm no longer in that category but there are a lot of young people thank you darling but there's a lot of language and even fractional bits of language that sort of evolve whether it's technological language or whatever I'm a fan of dignation and the stories that are constantly coming up there there's a lot of times I don't understand some of the things that they're describing because they're technical or in an area of science I don't get do you find that there's a whole culture of youth language servicing that's coming from people who are maybe understanding technology and language at a different level sure language has always language changes always richest in among youth but small children are the ones whose mispronunciations become a generation later the standard pronunciation of the language and adolescents of course in their enthusiasm in their desire not to sound like their parents in fact not to sound like anything their parents might understand produce new words and new slang and that just enters the language and happens nowadays perhaps with the help of the media with astonishing rapidity so one day in 1986 every adolescent girl in America woke up one morning and said as if happened one morning and you know that didn't come from 57 year old bank examiners right it bubbles up great next and just keep your hands up so that Lisa can see where she can strategize where she can go next would you have anything to say on the influence now but over the years of the day-to-day talk of disc jockeys particularly the morning people who've been supremely influential in radio going back to Arthur Godfrey and now up to Howard Stern does this strike you as anything it's there I mean what's going on I think radio talk has been interestingly influential and as you say is a line going back to Arthur Godfrey and before to the 1920s and 30s when radio first became an important cultural force in America and it's going on now certainly with political radio in very interesting ways to political radio and mostly right wing radio because that's mostly what there is I was fascinated the way these people talk I was listening to Limbaugh this morning and he's extraordinarily gifted at just doing this endless monologue that keeps people entertained and engaged and a little bit infuriated and so forth and interestingly one difference I noticed between Limbaugh and your ordinary NPR host the host on NPR always addresses his or her listener in the singular if you go home and get yourself a new such and such but it's always in the singular for Limbaugh and Hannity and so on it's always you guys, you all and the impression is of not of the speaker addressing each listener so to speak individually but rather of addressing a collection of people all at once it's a difference if you listen for it you'll hear very striking, Stern does this too but you'll hear very strikingly between certain kinds of AM talk guys mostly and NPR people and implies a very different sense of how the communications working and who's talking to who you know what I write in my commentary I'm writing to a person I might be talking about everybody but I'm writing to one person and that's exactly right that's exactly reflected there speaking of the radio issue when television came along they said radio was going to be dead now we have one newspaper after another folding do you think we'll be done with newspapers in any kind of a malleable form be it cornstarch or what it sure looks that way doesn't it it's scary I talked to my class at Berkeley just just last week and we were talking about all the ways we use our literacy I said well raise your hand tell me all the different ways you use your literacy before you came here and they got the picture I looked in my wallet to see how much money I have I read my alarm clock I checked my BART ticket to see if I had money left on it and so on I said about 50 or 60 kids there I said how many of you sat down in the morning and read a newspaper and these are all Berkeley undergraduates I mean they're highly literate kids not one of them raised a hand you know when I was in college and graduate school I didn't read newspapers I didn't read newspapers until much later and my life sort of changed I became more of an adult were they all I'm trying to figure out whether they were never reading newspapers they get their news online I don't know who they expect to pay for the New York Times, the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal that they read on Mom and Dad who's going to pay all those reporters to sit in Sacramento and Washington so these are as I say undergraduates they're interested in the news and world affairs they just don't read newspapers so they get it so I said great next there we go well I don't think we have enough time for me to address your scurrilous comments about Henry James but I'm wondering language has always grown new words and then had them drop off and nobody today cares about these knees or anything like that but we now have all of this technology that sort of runs together and seems to speed things up and I'm wondering if you see that as something that's just going to speed up the process that always happens or if it's actually going to change the process somehow let me first say about Henry James James was fascinated by the telegraph if you if you read Portrait of a Lady I can't remember her name Isabel Archers at is a devotee of writing these incomprehensible telegrams that Ralph and his uncle sort of tried to understand he in fact wrote a wonderful story called In the Cage about a woman who works in a telegraph office who's reading these telegrams between a man in his sweetheart and isn't sure what role to play but he's fascinated by the telegraph and by telegraphic language he just didn't write that way and as far as the pace of change it's certainly the case that the media churn out although a lot of language does bubble up other language is created by the media and spreads very rapidly rapidly diffuse and rapidly disappears every one of the most interesting ways of forming words in English or another language is by making what are called portmanteau words where you blend two items together one of the first is Jerry Mander was one of the first of these words there are now hundreds and thousands of those words in English from a monokini to jazzer size to the names of corporations like Microsoft and if you just pick up a newspaper you'll see thousands and thousands of words like that every one of them a media creation nobody ever sitting around the breakfast table coined a word like that and used it among his or her friends so it's an indication of the degree to which by the way with Jerry Mander which was a media creation in the early 19th century it's an indication of the way to which the media has taken a role in shaping the language well how about dictionaries I mean what's happening to them you just sit there and you type your word online I mean you don't go over and get your big book anymore and open it up I mean there's no they used to need to sell that big hunk to make the whole economy work yeah it's not clear I was associate for many years and still I'm with the American Heritage Dictionary and the dictionary has not fallen off in sales quite in the way the encyclopedia printing encyclopedia is finished gone they're never going to publish another edition of the Britannica they still sell print dictionaries I don't know whether just for somebody you can't give somebody a floppy disc or whatever it's for his bar mitzvah yes you need it you need a book and the print dictionary does have a symbolic function that you miss online when the American Heritage first came online many many years ago and I actually had to install it in my machine I had about 18 floppies oh that's right if you remember that and I was sitting in my office and a friend came in and said it's such and such a word I can't remember what it is and I said gee I don't know but as it happened just got my dictionary installed on my machine so let me see if it's a word and I typed the word in it it's not in this dictionary in fact nothing like it is a word because this looks for similar words and he said well how big is that dictionary now I knew because I was associated with the American Heritage I said there are 182,000 boldface entries in this dictionary something most people couldn't tell and he says well how big is that and I pulled the big folio size American Heritage from the side of the desk I just thumped it down thump on the desk I said it's not in this dictionary he said oh then it's not a word it's not a word but you can't do that with a dictionary online now we have another question right here okay great oh yes I wanted to ask you the first time I heard somebody say computer geek I thought to myself you know I don't like that sound it sounds terrible I'm going to go look it up and found out that geek actually has a derogatory meeting as an original expression so do you think the people who adopt words like geek and apply them to themselves know what they're doing or is it based on complete ignorance I'm going to take that as the technical as the technical person here it sounds funny here but what I've found is that people who are really technical who are what we really would think of as geeks don't like the word geek they find it's a pejorative but people who want to assume technical credentials that they don't have oh they're geeks they're geeks I'm a super user who sold you that what was that about so there's this adaptation of somebody once told me who was trying to get into being a science reporter she once said I'm just a science groupie I was all I could do not just say you are a political science major you know science groupie that's not science either it was like nobody who took more than two courses in science would consider themselves a science groupie they'd sit down and try to learn some science so what we do is we get I think there's the the word that may mean something in the popular culture when you finally get closer and closer to people actually doing it then those differentiation start to start to fall out hacker is another word a hacker inside the tech community has nothing to do with ethical or unethical use it has to do with your level of capability and how close you can get to the bits and the bytes and the machines and the inside and on the outside of the tech community that's the unethical people who are working to break into computers so again to the same word similar in the similar area the two different meanings depending on how close you are do you want to say something about that? I agree geek is one of these words people who have adopted the word there's there's a phrase linguist used called reclaimed epithets where a group takes a word that was originally used pejoratively and says yeah I'm queer and proud of it for example in dykes on bikes was saying we're going to take this word and make it our own and so forth and geek has some of that quality people who say I'm proud to be a geek although a geek was originally bit heads off chickens and so on there was a pop song a couple of years ago called the geeks get the girls I can't remember the name of the group though wishful thinking lyricist by any definition that's great next right there I have a two-parter one is one of my favorite words is phony and that is a technologically linked word is it not? you know I don't know I should know I know it dates from the late 1930s and I don't know why whether it's connected to phone or how it's connected to the phone phony no eye contact or just the sound of the voice did not sound like perhaps I don't know some things unauthentic about that and then the other thing I wanted to ask you is are there brand new languages I mean we're talking about usage here by and large but is spanglish a new language well if you think it depends of course what you call a language and I say it's not a technical term linguists don't there's no technical test for deciding when something's become a language spanglish to the extent that it's an unstable variety spoken by people who speak both English and Spanish is the more standard community language isn't really probably a language of its own what has to happen for a language to form is that a community has to be constituted around a form of speech that's somehow broken off from the original community and then very rapidly you'll get new changes that's what happened for example with the Creole of languages what we think of as Creoles now where you had for example slaves taken from Africa from various tribes who didn't speak any language in common who were thrown together and took the roots of the English or Spanish or French vocabulary depending on when it was combined it with elements of common African grammar and formed these Creoles that were really new languages in that sense it's a very interesting process English some people say may have gone through a stage of Creolization at the time of the Norman conquest and one obviously that's interesting to linguists precisely because it does shed some light on the origin of language which is something about which we have no direct evidence but we don't have any new ones emerging right now well languages might be emerging it's hard to know we don't know it's very hard to say okay I think we have time for maybe two more questions okay you talk about talking points I think that language public language has become much more I wouldn't say necessarily formal but much more prepared such that when you turn on a news show or something you get much more likely to get a pitch than the kind of conversation that you're having now and this seems to me to be a trend that's happening more and more well you know it's interesting you would say that I like how you said a pitch I'm always watching how people are talking you know so we're having this Jeff and I are having a conversation we're having a conversation both of us kind of turned to you and let me explain a little about this and that's almost like an informal teaching mode in the best sense of teacher you know not standing up in front of the room and I'm going to give you the lesson for today but we really want you to know and I've seen Jeff give prepared talks and you know it's a prepared talk but he wants you to know what he's talking about the sensibility I mean I just got such a good picture I said that because so much of what you watching when you watch the news somebody's kind of pitching you a story here and I want you to know and this is what I want you to understand about it on to the next one it's not really the kind of engagement and looking for you're going to really understand it we don't quite know what you're going to do with it so I don't know if that's what you mean but I think that's sort of a style that's evolved and don't forget these people are not only talking that way and we've gone from 20 seconds to check also not just what they're saying but everything going on there you got trailers along the bottom you got things you got people walking around I mean it's completely nuts what do you want to look at there's better be 15 things going at different speeds so I think that's a style that's evolved and it limits what you can communicate and who you can communicate it to but that may be a good thing given what they want to do what's your response to that completely different take I think it has to do with the way the media work if you give the and this is the sort of the pre-electronic or the pre-web media if you give people only three or four points and just keep hitting on them and hitting on them and hitting on them and hitting them that's all that the press is going to be able to take home to report in their stories and the people who do this are very good at it I think in my last book I talked about what was up till about two or three years ago the success of the Republicans in the right in doing this in coordinating their story so that the radio host the people at the think tanks and the institutes the legislators the politicians were all hitting the same talking points and Newt Gingrich's list of phrase whatever it was the contract for American so on was exactly that here are the phrases we're going to hit on or whatever it happens it's going to be the death tax it's going to be the family values and so on and just hitting on those points over and over again and it was very and it remains very effective as a means of communicating what also is kind of funny occasionally someone will hire me for a very big event and they want me to be the emcee and on occasion you go and they have all those the see-through panels so that you actually are seeing what your speech is what you're supposed to say and I'm like let me get this straight for the next two and a half hours I want me to just read what you have on the screen I'm like I can't do that I have to make up things I have to say didn't you just hear what that last guy said let's talk about what this guy is going to say and so I mean it is very formulaic that's exactly right so we have the last question last question I'll come up here so I have this fascinating experience where I was informally pulling people on the word intimacy and I would ask what's the first words that come to mind when I say the word intimacy and 80% of the time people would say sex now intimacy doesn't mean sex and I'm wondering how we evolved if you could comment on how as a society we've turned to mean that and then also any ideas for how to respond to that because I struggle with how else to communicate the sort of work that we do without using intimacy it's interesting and a problem words that are used in some way euphemistically quickly acquire the color and the tone of the thing that they're being used I think it's like draping sheets over the furniture to hide the furniture but it takes the shape of the thing it's meant to cover and that's the way things always work with euphemisms casualty began its life as a euphemism for death casualty was an accidental loss as in a casualty company and of course became no longer a euphemism and this is particularly true with words that apply to sex intercourse was a roundabout way of talking about sex and now of course if you say intercourse even much more so than intimacy that's the only thing that comes to people's minds explicit language just means language that's explicit except that if you talk about explicit language you know it's bad warning as it says on iTunes explicit you know they're not talking about explicit discussions of the economy so it's very hard to recover words from that once they've fallen so to speak the fallen euphemisms is the same way you can't imagine recovering on any of these words or collateral damage now once a great euphemism now means civilian casualties and I don't know with intimacy it's a much greater loss than with some of these others I agree with you but I'm not sure if there's any way you can recover I have to say these are great questions and you can all tell it's so easy to talk to Jeff forever that just gives a little wrap of final thoughts here tonight it's going to be an interesting you know I was just I have a new book coming out I wrote the introduction last because that's always with you and I was thinking about and this book is called The Years of Talking Dangerously and it looks back at the last part of particularly the Bush years in the language of politics and so on and I was thinking that language that really sort of fell apart Bush in a speech toward the end of his presidency said well if I had something to do differently I probably wouldn't have said mission accomplished and so on but that all fell apart and right now we're in this big economic mess but my sense is that the language of American politics is going to change more in the coming decade than it's changed in the last 50 years and I have no idea what direction it's going to take but I think it's going to be a very interesting time to be a linguistic observer well you heard it here first because when the book comes out you're coming on Technation right? I'd be delighted and you get to repeat it but you heard it first that's the good reason to come to the San Francisco Maine Public Library absolutely Jeff thank you so much Thank you Thank you more about you