The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter

Malcolm sits down with the linguist John McWhorter, to discuss his new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. Among other things in their wide-ranging conversation, John makes an impassioned case for the return of “thou.” Get ad-free episodes to Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin http://apple.co/pushkin Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus https://www.pushkin.fm/join-pushkin See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 0:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on, and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet,

• 1:09Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 1:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 2:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  Pushkin.

• 2:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  I was a fan of John McWhorter long before I met him for the first time. McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University, and a music lover, and a New York Times columnist. Basically, a Renaissance man. It was maybe 2019 when we first spoke. At the time, I was working on something about Tom Bradley, who was mayor of Los Angeles from 1973 to 1993. And while I listened to old tapes of Bradley, I was struck by something I heard. Listen.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  There is nothing there to hide. I want everybody to know that Tom Bradley's life has been an open book, and this is another demonstration of that.

• 2:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  Tom Bradley is black. Born in Texas, grew up in south-central Los Angeles. So I went to see McWhorter, went to his Rabbit Warren of an office, played him that bit of tape, and said, "Explain this to me. Why does a black guy, whose parents were sharecroppers from Texas, sound like Cary Grant?" And for an hour of the most wonderful conversation, he explained to me exactly why he did. Fast forward a few years, I was doing our series on the 1936 Olympics, and I got obsessed with Dorothy Thompson, who was one of the most important journalists in the world in the 1930s. And I heard some old tapes of her, and she sounded like she was a Duchess of York, only...

• 3:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  Do you know where she grew up? Buffalo. So who do I go to see to explain how people from Buffalo end up sounding like English royalty? You guessed it, John McWhorter. My point is that there is a certain kind of question about language, about race, about why we speak the way we speak, for which the only answer is, let's call up John McWhorter. I love John McWhorter. And when he said he had a new book coming out called Pronoun Trouble, I asked him, "Could I interview you about it?" And lucky for me, he said yes.

• 4:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  My name is Malcolm Gladwell. This is Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, we're going to run the conversation I had with John McWhorter this spring at the 92nd Street Y, which was delightful.

• 4:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  I did this interview with John right after finishing up the Joe Rogan episode of Revisionist History. If you listen to it, you'll know that I spent a lot of time talking about how to properly interview someone, how hard it is, and how Joe Rogan could learn a lot from someone like Oprah. And that episode was very much on my mind as I was interviewing McWhorter, because I was thinking, oh, am I going to measure up? Where do I land on the Oprah-Joe Rogan continuum? I'll let you be the judge of that, although I will say, this is not exactly a fair test. The degree of difficulty with interviewing someone as charming as John McWhorter is very, very low.

• 5:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  Hello, everyone. Thanks for coming. John, thank you for agreeing to join us tonight.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Malcolm, thank you for having me.

• 5:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  No, the, um, this is our, I wanted to, I was thinking back when I, I first met you, and I think it was, I called you, Oprah, went to see you, because I was doing something on the first black mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was Tom Bradley, that's right.

• 5:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  And I was listening to tapes of him speaking, and he sounded like the whitest guy I could imagine. And I was trying to figure out why.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  He sounded like a Disney announcer.

• 5:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  Like a Disney announcer. And you gave, wait, tell me a little, before we even get into this, it was so much fun, your answer. Explain to me why that would be so.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  I don't remember what I said then, because it was before you-know-what, and therefore, it feels like it was 75 years ago. But I know that I probably would have said that he would have grown up in a time when the unspoken cultural expectations of oratory culture were such that if you were trying to make your way in the world, whatever color you are as an American, there was an expectation... That you would learn the standard dialect and be absolutely comfortable in it. And frankly, Booker T. Washington did that, too. He was born a slave. If you listen to recordings, you'd think he was Teddy Roosevelt. And that's because that's what you had to do, which was kind of unfair. But I was thinking, he comes from the time when black people were expected to speak that way if they wanted to have public influence.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  And I'm sure that he spoke in different ways when he did not have the camera on.

• 6:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Didn't I say that?

• 6:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  I think you said something along that lines. And we were, the thing, the fascinating question is, when did that stop? It stopped.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  He doesn't sound like that if he's the mayor of Los Angeles today.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  No, no, that, that ended in the late 60s. And there was a new idea, and in some ways, a healthy idea, that to be taken seriously, you don't have to learn to talk in the standard way. You can express yourself how you feel like it.

• 7:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  The minute I mentioned Tom Bradley to you, you were like, oh. I remember I played you a tape. You were like, oh. And I realized, oh, this is old hat for John. This is what it means to be a linguist. You're constantly entertaining, asking yourself those kinds of questions. You can't let a...

• 7:27Speaker 03

  More or less, yeah. Although I happen to be what's called a historical linguist, which means that I'm interested in how language changes. You can be somebody who's interested in just how language is right now. In which case, that Tom Bradley question would be less of interest. But for me, it's all about what was going on in the past. And especially nowadays, we're at the point where you have 100 years. It's actually technically 102 years of people recorded speaking and moving at the same time. And so there's some sound films starting in 1923. And that, to me, is history, especially now that we've got the internet. And so you can just see these things happening, and you can listen to the way people talk. And so that's something I do.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Not all linguists would be inclined to do that. They would do other interesting things. But it's a little obsession of mine, especially lately. How has American English changed over about the past 125 years when you can actually hear it? You can listen to, this won't go on for too much longer, but you can listen to the black... Musical theater artist Burt Williams, who has a certain name. But he first became famous working with George Walker. They're two black men. You can see them in pictures. And you know, they've they've got the minstrel makeup and they're in these forced poses. And you kind of think, what what were they like? And it's hard to tell. There's some recordings of them. There are a few. And they're like, like that. And you can listen to the way they spoke and sang. They both sound Caribbean, including George Walker.

• 8:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  Really?

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Who grew up in Kansas. Because black English vowels were different back then. If you listen to black people on cylinders from the 1890s and then them, they don't say coat. They say quote like that. Somebody's gonna marry me. Somebody's going to marry me. That's how they sounded. And so these are the obsessions that one starts to have.

• 9:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  When you say you have, but this is, it sounds like a fantastic obsession, by the way. How does that like? Is this something you do sort of for fun? In other words, do you have places you go to find these historical? Or are you just watching a movie from the 30s and you stop it and you go back five minutes and you play up a?

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Both of those things.

• 9:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Both of them.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's not only black people. It's just people in general. Listen to that vowel. Why did the person use the word fantastical in that particular way? There are all sorts of things. And then like, do I go looking for it? Not necessarily. But if I find out that there is some four CD player set called Sounds of the Deep Past. The first thing I'm thinking is how interesting could most of that be? But there'll be two things where somebody is black or somebody is using something colloquial. And so I'll listen to all four of those damn CDs once. Because you never know what you're gonna get. And you get just enough to put into books and to mention to you and things like that. So.

• 10:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  When did you? When did you? At what point in your, in your career, life, whatever? Did you realize that this was something of particular interest to you?

• 10:28Speaker 03

  You mean linguistics in general?

• 10:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  No, no, this thing you're just talking about.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Oh, that.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  It's a summer day in nineteen seventy-five. And my father's got his beer and he's watching this bad old movie. And it was a movie biography, old one, of Stephen Foster. And the people keep walking through and they, the vowels are different. I'm gonna write Swanee River. And I asked him, why do they talk that way? And he said, well, you know, things change. That's about all he had. But I remember thinking, those were real people. And yet, they don't talk like us. Why? And then a seed was gradually planted. There's an episode of, I've never spoken about this. There's an episode of The Lucy Show.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Not I Love Lucy, but her second show that got bad. And in one of the early episodes, she, Lucy gets a maid. And the maid is snobbish and so Lucy starts buying the maid lunch. And at one point she says, oh, it's a roast chicken. It's broasted. And she says, it's broasted. And I was listening to that when I was about thirteen and thinking, that's not a word anymore, is it? That sort of thing, for some reason, interests me. And next thing you know, you've got so much of it stuck crowding out more important things in your head. But you can write books about it.

• 11:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  John, you gotta do better than that. You can't say, for some reason, it interested me. You gotta tell me. You gotta tell us more than that.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  The way people talk is very resonant to me. And as I've gotten older, I've realized that for other people, it's the way people walk. Or the way somebody dances, or the way people dress. But I know from a very early age, just speech was interesting. It was a window into the soul. People spoke differently. And that was about this much blackness. It was just listening to people in general. Getting a sense that my teachers had a certain accent that the white people on TV didn't have. In Philadelphia, you say lousy, whereas Lucy says lousy. And I was thinking, well, that's interesting. Annoying my southern relatives by noticing that they had different vocabulary here and there. You know, I'm this, this little kid, I talk like this. And I say, you say carry when we would say take.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  And they would get tired of that. But I, I realized it was because I was interested in dialect. Also, um...

• 12:53Speaker 03

  One thing I missed, and I think it's partly from being black, is I never heard black English as wrong. I didn't grow up speaking it, I grew up hearing it, I have a good passive competence. But I remember cousins who, you know, very much spoke it, and they would use features of black English, and I would listen and not think nothing, you know, some people just not care. I would not think, "That's bad grammar, that's wrong." I wouldn't think it was exotic, I would listen to it and think, "Hmm, that's different from the way I would put it, and I wonder why, is that based on something in history?" I had one cousin who was using what we call the narrative ad, people who study black English, and so, and then we had gone downstairs, and then we had seen that there was a raccoon in the basement, and then we had said, "Hey, let's get rid of that raccoon," and then

• 13:37Speaker 03

  we had gone back upstairs, and I keep waiting for, "You had what, and then what?" And it was just all "had." And I remember listening to Darren doing that and thinking, "That must be different instead of him not knowing what 'had' means." And then, years later, I found out that linguists had written about that.

• 13:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  Wait, my wife, who's black, uh, she uses that, that's where it comes from.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  What?

• 14:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  She sticks "had" in the craziest places.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  It might be a black thing, yeah, or like when Will Smith says, "Well, what had happened was..."

• 14:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's what she did.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  She said, "Today she said, 'I had went.'" Now, understand, this is a highly educated, went-to-Pristin corporate lawyer.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  In her...

• 14:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  She just takes "had" and just kinda like shovels it in randomly into her sentences.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  That is, that is because it's a good, earthy, yet systematic way of using, using the language. It's called narrative "had." There are papers about it. Notice I say "papers," there's one paper about it.

• 14:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  So her father, wait, I wanna, her father grew up in both Harlem and Jacksonville, Florida? And he would be growing up in the 50s.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. He would have gotten that narrative hat from Harlem, most likely.

• 14:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  From Harlem?

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's good, solid, northern, black English.

• 14:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. Now, you said something earlier, uh, that, um, you didn't speak black English growing up. Why not?

• 15:03Speaker 03

  That's deep, Malcolm, actually. I, um, that gets into my parents and what they were like. And so, plenty of black family, speaking the dialect fluently. Mount Airy in Philadelphia was a very integrated neighborhood. The black people in the neighborhood had become middle-class from mostly being working-class. So there was plenty of black English spoken in the neighborhood. Close friends of mine spoke it. My mother grew up speaking southern black English, but switched to a kind of generalized suburban northern when she moved to Philadelphia. My father spoke Philadelphia black English, but, and this is something I really have only wrapped my head around over the past, about, year, really thinking about it.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  They were not inclined to use their vernacular around their kids. They didn't speak it to us. I remember thinking, Mom gets on the phone with her relatives and all of a sudden, there's this other way she has of speaking. I was trying to wrap my head around it. Whereas, to tell you the truth, most black moms would have spoken that way, at least some, to their kids as well. And the truth is, both of my parents tried their best. They were both brilliant people. They provided a materially great existence. But they were both very closed-off people in general. And that played out in terms of dialect. Then, also, my sister talks exactly like me. If I have a weird voice, there's one other person. It's my sister, who's four years younger, and she sounds just like this. So it was, it was both of us.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  And I find myself thinking sometimes, we both do that, but also, I'm not, I'm not an imitator. You know, as much as I love other languages and trying to learn them and never, never doing it as well as I'd like to. Holly, my sister, went to Spelman and came back with this new repertoire. All of a sudden, she could switch. She had a kind of black English. She had the cadence. Whereas, I never did that. And to be honest, if I had gone to Morehouse, I don't think that would have happened. Talk the way I talk and other people imitate me. And I think that's just, you know, neurons or something. You know, I like, like the way I talk. I'm not gonna talk like someone else. But that is the reason. And I wish that I had picked it up for real. Because not having that natural competence

• 17:13Speaker 03

  means that you come off sometimes as thinking you're better than people. When really, it's just that that's not in your mouth. And I can completely understand what it would look like from another perspective. But yeah, that's it. Sometimes, to be honest, I have wished that I was. And I'm not just saying this because it's you, except I am. I wished that I was black Canadian. Because I think that's less of an issue there in terms of the place of American black English in what it is to be a black person. But that's just an idle thought.

• 17:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  I remember the first time I saw that kind of to the switching as a kid in Jamaica. Seeing my uncle, you know, a brown-skinned Jamaican who talked to us in the Queen's English. And he was getting gas at a gas pump.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  That must have been amazing.

• 18:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  And I'm maybe nine. Gets out of the car and he starts talking to the guy pumping the gas. And there's some, it wasn't just that he switched into patois. It was that he also, his manner completely changed.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  You're a different person.

• 18:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  That he was, they were, they were doing that Jamaican thing where they're shouting at each other, even though they're not angry.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  Which I had never seen before. I thought this is the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my entire life. That he could go from literally Malcolm blah blah blah. And then boom. And it was just that kind of.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  And that kind of trash talking thing.

• 18:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  Just like.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  There are papers written about that. One, actually. Yeah, that is, that is very common. That must have been wild. Yeah, especially to see that big a switch. Because in my case, it was like from here to here. But with patois, first he's Margaret Thatcher. And then suddenly, he's Bob Marley. That must have been amazing.

• 18:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  When my mother, hearing my, then I began to hear my mother when she would get angry. She would lapse, not into full-on patois, but you could hear the Jamaican coming out of her voice. That idea as well. No, it's funny, because I'm making the same, on some level, observations you are as a child. But I have no. What sidetracks me at that age is not how people are speaking, but how they're telling, how they're explaining things. I get obsessed, in the same way that you, I think, it's funny. In the same way that you got obsessed with how your people are expressing themselves.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Grammar, yeah.

• 19:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  To me, it was about, we're, we're gonna, we're playing hearts, and our cousin doesn't know how to play hearts. And my brother starts explaining hearts to my cousin. He's doing it all wrong. That was my obsession. I'm six, I'm just like, why, why? Start with a point of the game. Like, what are you doing?

• 19:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  And I realized how deeply kind of.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  And it bothered you.

• 19:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, to this day, it works.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  I always just assumed that people were gonna do stuff wrong. And I would have been listening to what the grammar was.

• 20:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  No, no, no. The surest way for me to completely lose my cool is to read instructions that someone has written for something. Just like, what are you, this is, I mean, come on. I want to call up the company and volunteer my services. We'll be right back with more of my conversation with John McWhorter.

• 20:37Speaker 00

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• 21:14Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 21:59Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 22:43Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 23:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  I want to talk a little bit about your... And by the way, I always find this question, if it's asked of me, deeply annoying. So you don't have to answer it if you don't want to. But I wanted to talk about your kind of place in the culture right now, which is really interesting to me. And I have a grand unified John McWhorter theory.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  I want to hear this, because I don't.

• 24:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  Here's my theory. At any given moment in sort of popular culture, intellectual popular culture, there is someone who's allowed to get away with saying anything. You're that person.

• 24:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  I think you get to say whatever you want.

• 24:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  For a variety of reasons, which I'd like you to unpack.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Can you give me...

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Can you give me one half of an example of what you mean? Like, I'm allowed to say it, but no one else is. As in...

• 24:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  You wrote a beautiful... Was it an op-ed? I can't remember where you wrote it. A thing about your own experience with affirmative action.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 24:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  No one else could write that.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  True.

• 25:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  You write about... You, in your column, are constantly,

• 25:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  in a very beautiful way, kind of setting down the rules for discourse, particularly around... It was your code-switching column of yesterday. Like, alright, you're not allowed to do that. You go this way.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  I forget them the minute I write them.

• 25:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  You can't.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  This... Oh, today is... What's her name? The congresswoman... Jasmine Crockett. Yes, okay.

• 25:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  Jasmine Crockett. You said, very gently and nicely, you said to her, "Come on now. You get to do that."

• 25:34Speaker 03

  I do. You know what?

• 25:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Who else can do that?

• 25:39Speaker 03

  What you're saying is something I'm feeling as I get a little older. Because I'm pushing 60, and so I'm no longer the young pup. And I feel like I've got a certain amount of life experience and also just I'm beginning to come off as the kind of person who you call "sir." Or in the parking lot, "Okay, boss." You know, that sort of thing. And so I'm beginning to take those chances to an extent. With Jasmine Crockett, I will say this. I was very careful in the wording of that because I thought, especially because she's forty and a bit, and I'm about to be sixty, I'm male, I have an imperious demeanor. I don't think that she did anything that was absolutely sinful.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  And so honestly, in the editing of that, we were very careful with the words. And so near the end of it, I say that her explanation for why she made fun of the man in the wheelchair was, um, what did I call it? I'm clever but hopeless. There was a, an idea that I was supposed to say clever but cowardly. And I said, no, that's, that's, that's too mean. I don't want to call her a coward. I want to say that the explanation just doesn't work. So I think part of it, but the fact that I wrote that at all. I don't know if I would have written that one twenty years ago. Or if I did, it would have been read as John just likes to criticize black people and he does that every week, when I actually do it very rarely. But I think what you're talking about is that I'm getting a little older

• 27:05Speaker 03

  and therefore feel like I can say things that I couldn't when I was Coleman Hughes's age, like thirty, where if I would say things, even if I thought I was right, it would be, you're too young. How dare you? And I really felt at the time, I need to respect my elders. I would try very hard to do that. Especially in black American culture, you don't, you don't sass your elders. You don't sass your parents. Well, now I'm my parents. And so I'm gonna start doing some constructive sass-ing. I think that's part of it.

• 27:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  Part of it as well, I think there's other layers. Well, one is that as a linguist, as someone who pays as much attention to language as you do,

• 27:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  you're better at it. I don't, I'm, I'm not, um, by which I mean that just the example you just gave on parsing the difference between cowardly and hopeless.

• 27:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  That someone who was not as attuned to the nuances of language might have said cowardly. With a quite, you know, there's quite a dramatic difference in the way that would be perceived and read.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  And you're, but you are professionally alert to those nuances. And that permits you a great deal more freedom. I think that most people dramatically underestimate how important word choice is and how acutely sensitive we are to the word, the words that are used, particularly if they're directed at us. I want to talk about my favorite chapter in the book.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  What's the favorite?

• 28:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's the, it's the chapter about you.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Thank you for it not being about they and them. Okay, you, yeah. That was the one that was the funnest to write.

• 28:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's the fun, it is, so just to work, explain briefly to everyone the structure of the book.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Um, the book is, it's not just a book about they. I mean, there, I think there already is a book just about they. I couldn't have sustained anyone's attention for that long. It's each pronoun, so there's I, there's you, there's he, she, it, there's we, and there's they. So that's seven chapters, notice that it's compact. And the idea is to give the history of each one of those little words and then to discuss some controversy that is connected with them. We kind of resist controversy. That chapter was a challenge because I was thinking, nobody fights over we. But I got a chapter out of it anyway. But that was, that was the point. And of course, when I was writing it in 2023 on a sun porch upstate, I was thinking, ha ha, happy linguistic pronouns. Because the book before this was called Woke Racism,

• 29:35Speaker 03

  and it was a bourbon-fueled, angry little screed that needed to be written in 2020. But it's this book where I'm screaming on every page. And books like that are not fun to write. So after that was over, I thought, I want to do one of the happy language books. And I thought, what about the pronouns? The last thing I was thinking was all of this debate we're having now about trans identity, et cetera. I was just writing about pronouns. So the book has fallen into a different atmosphere than I was expecting. But really, it's just me enjoying pronouns like in Nine Nasty Words, I enjoyed profanity. That's what this book is.

• 30:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  But you, so tell us, tell us the problem with you.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  You is a problem. I don't mean that you all are a problem. Oh, there was some black English, too.

• 30:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  We will get there.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  That was silly.

• 30:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  That was the problem.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  So it used to be, yeah, exactly, exactly. Thou Malcolm, as opposed to you in the audience. That's how English is supposed to be. Thou art sitting in a chair. You are sitting, to be honest with the lighting, I can't tell what you're sitting in, but I presume they are chairs. And so thou and you, you're supposed to have singular and then a plural one. In early Middle English and before, there was a dual. So if it's just you two, then it was yeet. And so thou, yeet, and you. And then they had case forms. Thou, if it's subject, thee, if it's an object. You was the object form, ye was the subject form, like he or ye. And then yeet didn't do that. But the possessive of yeet, if you wanted to say you two's book, ink book, get that.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  And so, ah, got it wrong, no, ink was the object form. Yeet and then ink. So I've done it all for you two, my children, I've done it all for ink. Inker was the possessive. So you had all of these you forms, and everything's chugging along, and today all we have is you. Not even ye and you, just you. Thou is gone, no thee, just you. It all just falls away.

• 31:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  Thou is the one we missed.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  It's like it had a disease, yeah.

• 31:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  Thou is the one we missed.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  We need thou.

• 31:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  We need thou.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  We need it back right now. But we can't, we can't do it.

• 31:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  No, so let's, convince us about why we need to have thou back.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  Well, if you think about it, if you're going from English to almost any language you're likely to learn, notice the first thing you learn is that there's something like tu, and then there's some plural form. You never learned that the word for you is the same both in the singular, if there's a chart in front of you. The singular and the plural, that's not how languages work. And so all over Europe, this is preserved, this difference is preserved. There are different spheres of influence that it has in different languages and at different times. But if it's Russian, it's supposed to be the and le. You don't have le used for everything, you don't have the used for everything. English is different in that way. English is a very odd language in certain corners of its being. And to tell the truth, it's obscure. We need a singular versus a plural form.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  And we try to create a plural form by saying y'all, or yous, or yins. And we're told that that's just funny. It's just slang. It smells like fish, or bubble gum, or marijuana. It's not, it's not a real word. And yet, all we're trying to do is be a normal language.

• 32:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  No, but so what's your preference here? There's two, there's two parallel strands of argument here. And I want to figure out which side you're on. So you originally is the plural.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Thou is the...

• 32:58Speaker 03

  Singular.

• 32:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  Singular. What has happened is that you has come to encompass both.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  And we, but we've developed these colloquial forms. Y'all, et cetera, to take up the plural position. And we've moved you to the singular.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  Do you think you should remain the singular? Or should you be moved back into the plural position? Take a stand.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  I'd like to see thou come back. I think we need thou. There was nothing wrong with it. It's just like German, du. We need thou. The problem is that thou sounds antique. Thou sounds like somebody in a peri wig who's about to die of yellow fever. Because it's so, so far back. But if we bring in you, then we have to accept y'all as legitimate.

• 33:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  Or yous.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Or you guys, or yous. And that's really tough, too, because of the aforesaid odors of those words.

• 33:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  Why did, I was thinking of, you know, so if someone wrote the hymn, "How great thou art today," it would be, "How great you are."

• 33:57Speaker 03

  How great you are.

• 33:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  Then sings my soul.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  It's not as good.

• 34:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  My savior God to thee, how great you are. How great you are. It doesn't work.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  Thou was, thou was great for art. Yeah. But art thou, but it would be hard to use out on the street. I, I think, do I say it in the book? No, that was about something else. You could not say thou naked. You know, it just, it wouldn't seem quite right.

• 34:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  I

• 34:28Speaker 03

  You have to use you.

• 34:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  But no, you've said there's problems with both positions, but come on, you're not answering my question.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  Trying.

• 34:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Well, if you had to, if I make you language, Zar,

• 34:38Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  And you get to push you to the singular plural position and either reinstate thou or establish you's and y'all, which move are you making?

• 34:53Speaker 03

  If I were the Zar,

• 34:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  Like if I could do an executive order, yeah, I would, um, you would be in the singular and I would enforce that you all was more widely accepted.

• 35:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  You like.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  I would say that the Wall Street Journal has to start allowing you all and it has to start being taught in school with a teacher with a stick at a blackboard.

• 35:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  That's, that's the way I would do it. Already when I teach about language, I say it's gonna be I, you, he, she, it, we, y'all, they. I always say that because you need, you need a y'all.

• 35:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  In that sense.

• 35:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  One of the things that it had not occurred to me till I read that chapter was that in the South, y'all is only, is, is the plural. That is to say, and if it's, if it's addressed to a person, you're invoking unseen others. I hadn't realized it. So if I go to the South and I say, well, that's what y'all think.

• 35:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  And I mean just you.

• 35:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  I've committed a violation.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, because they don't use it to mean the singular. But when they say it's one person, you're at a 7-Eleven, and somebody says, y'all come back, that doesn't mean y'all that one person right there. It means, it's implying that there's somebody out there in the car or something, which is, is the following.

• 36:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  It's a politeness strategy. So with du and vu, you can address a single person as vu, as if they're two people and so you're not hitting the person like this. If you say, y'all come back now, you're kind of saying vu, come back now. You're, you're taking away the directness. To say, you, you one individual, I hope you come back and buy another Slim Jim. That's a little, little direct as opposed to y'all come back. It's a very courtly thing, that y'all.

• 36:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  I want to go back to something. You said, well, we need to distinguish between the plural and singular you.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  Be nice.

• 36:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  But what problem does it create for us when we can't? Is it just a lack of specificity?

• 36:45Speaker 03

  It's just that you need to pause and clean something up. And you'd rather not have to. Imagine never having to say, "I don't mean you all, I mean just you." Or, "I mean just you, not you all over there." There are larger tragedies. But nevertheless, that is one of those things where, oh. That is one of those things where we have a ding. Like, for example, in French, you're driving a rental car. And you're in a big hurry and all the other cars are parked in a line. And you pull into a space. And you don't really park it right. And the butt of the car is kind of pushing out. So you run down into the little hut. And you say, "I'm sorry, but my car is sticking out." There's no way to put it that way in French. Nothing can stick out. You can say, "I didn't park properly." You can say that the row is uneven.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  But if you try to say, "The car is sticking out and I'm sorry," they don't have it. Now, does that mean that it's hard to be French? I doubt it. But it would be nice if they had that word. It would be nice if we had a "thou." Or if we could use "y'all" in the same way.

• 37:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. What I would like to see is the country divided on this question. There's a, there will be "thou" districts. And then there would be "y'all" districts.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Oh, that would be adorable.

• 37:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Because I don't like "y'all," to be honest. I do like "thou."

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Huh.

• 38:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  I would like "thou" to come back.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  "Thou." "Thou art." "Thou art" reading. It just sounds like somebody who died 150 years ago. But I could get used to it.

• 38:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  But is that? This is another sort of interesting language question, though. Is that because? Is that going to be as true for our children? Will our children have the same associations with "thou"? I mean, once. Why do I think? I sang at him for a reason. I grew up singing at him. All of my associations with "thou" are biblical. If we move into a world in which people's association with with religious practice is vanishing. Then doesn't that free us up to go back and?

• 38:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  Pick up a lot of that stuff?

• 38:46Speaker 03

  Um, it, it's possible. It's funny you say religious because I forgot something, which is that I went to a Quaker school, Friend Select in Philadelphia in the late seventies. And back then, there was the last cohort of teachers, Quaker teachers, who were still using the and thy and in natural speech, the ones who were super Quaker as in dressing Quaker. And I remember there was this one teacher who would come and, you know, look at your paper and say, "Don't forget to put thy name on thy paper." And he meant it straight. He didn't mean it ironically. And you know, part of why I don't like thou, I never thought about this. You're making me think about a lot of things I haven't thought about. Because one day, he decided to take a long trip in a canoe and he happily, you know, pulled out into the Delaware River and, you know, was talking about when he was gonna

• 39:31Speaker 03

  come back and no one ever saw that man again. And I must admit that I associate thou with that man. And that is much too arbitrary. So I can't laugh at this man's demise, but I need to stop that. I would, I would enjoy there being thou, but I'm trying to imagine it imposed on a whole society. And I cannot see my ten and thirteen year old feeling differently about it, but then again, there are aspects of them that I may never know. I'll ask them next time I see them.

• 40:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  And what about the, you mentioned this in, I believe, in passing, the English use of one, you do, yes.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  One, do the English upper crust resolve this problem by, if I say one in the way that English, one doesn't think that, does one?

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  What am I, am I explicitly freeing up you to be in the plural form? Is that what I'm doing?

• 40:24Speaker 03

  Well, in that case, we use you colloquially. Well, why suddenly can I not talk? And he had a stroke that night. You colloquially, but we would actually say, "You can't do that, can you?" And so you gets dragged even into that one usage, which ended up replacing, it was originally a word man, which was not man, but it was man. And then man just dropped away. Everything drops away in English like autumn leaves for some reason. But you have the one and you're saying, does that allow?

• 40:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  Is that why they're doing that? Why, why are the? Why does the English upper class use "one" instead of "you"?

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Because "you" is overstressed. Because not only is it used in the singular and the plural, but you also use it for this indefinite. Real Germanic languages, normal European languages, have some dedicated pronoun, as we call it, for the indefinite. That's one thing that a pronoun should do. That book should have an extra chapter. In Old English, it was "man". Then "man" shortened to "me", and so you would say, you know, "You gotta do it", and you would say, "Me gotta do it", that's not very accurate Middle English, but you get my point. And then it just, that "me", flew away, and "you" ended up being dragged in for that too. We work that little word so hard. It's a miracle that we don't trip over our linguistic shoelaces with it more, but languages aren't usually like that. There's one I know of in New Guinea. It's called Berwick,

• 41:42Speaker 03

  and all they have is "I", "we", then "you", and then there's one word that means "he", "she", "it", and "they", one word like "quack", it's not "quack", but it's just one thing. But we're more like that than we are like the European languages that we're actually related to.

• 41:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  John, sorry to be a dog with a bone here, but why don't we all use the English "one"?

• 42:01Speaker 03

  In order to give you a break?

• 42:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  Because if it says...

• 42:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  In order to give one a break.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Right. But we can't, because if you use "one" in that way, you sound like you have a big mustachio, and you walk with a cane, and you're in black and white in an old movie played by an actor named C. Aubrey Smith. "One" mustn't do that. It's too high.

• 42:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  As a kid, we would make fun of this, because my father would, I think, I think he would use this locution and then he abandoned it. Because you're trapped once you start with the "one", one doesn't think that one should do that, does one? And then you realize this is an endless stream of "ones" in your future.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  Or Fat Waller saying, "One never knows, do one", but that was arch. He was saying that while he's knocking back the gin. That was funny. In his real life, he certainly wouldn't have said, you know, "One never knows", and so "one", for arbitrary reasons, is marked. And so it has that upper crust meaning, and most of us are only upper crust on occasion. And so we need something more casual, and it ends up being "you", poor little "you", all the time.

• 43:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. It's a heartbreaking chapter.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  It is.

• 43:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  We'll be right back with more of my conversation with John McWhorter.

• 43:32Speaker 00

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• 45:33Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 46:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  We have questions. Some of these questions are really good.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  The questions are always fun.

• 46:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  How does English compare with other languages in terms of words on the move? The shifting of words meaning over time?

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Words are on the move. That was the title of one of my books, actually. Words are on the move all the time, in all languages. Some of them are moving faster than others. But there's no such thing as a language where the words just stay where they are. And it can be hard to process that the words are on the move, because it usually, not always, but usually, happens very slowly. But words meanings are always kind of morphing. Obnoxious used to mean vulnerable to harm. And so, don't render yourself obnoxious by wearing too few clothes to the jousting tournament. That's not the... You take my point. So, it only came to mean noxious because it sounded like noxious. And so, we now use

• 47:16Speaker 03

  it to mean that. If you look in a grammar guide in about 1900, there's always some person... The kind of person who says "one" and has that mustache. Who is complaining, "People are using obnoxious to mean annoying when really it's supposed to mean subject to harm, sniff, sniff, we're gonna have to deal with this, this is a sign of the lack of education." And so, that is what happens to all words, and that's true in Japanese, Hungarian, Tahitian. There's no language where that's not happening.

• 47:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  Someone once told me, I don't know if this is true as a Canadian, that in Quebec, the French that is spoken is archaic French. So, why is Quebecois French not moving at the same pace as French-French? So, that does suggest that different languages move at different rates.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  That's a very good question, and the answer to it is that Parisian French is one thing, the French of Quebec, and it's actually very similar to Cajun French, is a different grouping of dialects. And so, you can say that these things are older, but the thing is that those dialects have changed a great deal since they were moved over to Quebec. And the Quebec dialect is very different than what it would have been in, say, the late 1600s and the 1700s. It's just that you can still see the likenesses. It's not that Quebec stayed the way this was. And so, all languages move along, and the truth is, I have not done a study of the joual spoken in, for example, Montreal.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  I'm sure that that variety has changed more in the past 300 years than French, standard French in Paris, because written languages change more slowly. So, if a language is just allowed to do what it wants to do, like some language in a rainforest spoken by indigenous people, it's never written down, that language moves along considerably, such that you might even have a little bit of a problem understanding your great-great-grandparents. Once it's on the page, and your brain is kind of on writing, as I put it, and you think that the real language is written, then it tends to slow language change down. So, what we know is how language changes, where when they, the new "they" comes in, we're thinking, "Good lord, what happened?"

• 49:24Speaker 03

  That would not shock people as much if this were an unwritten language. Language changes very quickly until it's yoked to the page, which is true of only about 200 of the 7,000 languages that there are. The idea that you think of the language in writing and then you think of speaking is just a sloppy way of how it's done on the page, that's only a very few languages, and we happen to be speaking one. Normal human language gets to mind its own business. And so it's faster for them.

• 49:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  What are your thoughts on black American English being adopted by younger generations in the slang they use? I'm assuming this question is about by younger and in some cases, non-black generations.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  I think it's great, and I know that there is a strain of thought that says that non-black people are stealing black English features and appropriating them, and that there should be a line. But for one, there could never be that line. That line couldn't happen, especially with the mainstreaming of hip-hop. And it's getting to the point where you can be a thoroughly mature person and not really remember when rap was listened to by basically all kids. That happened really in the 90s. But once you've got that, and you've got that music in people's ears, and just in general, I think that it's a sign that there is less of a color line than there used to be, and we all know that, you know, we still have work to do. But there was a different time.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  There was 1950, and then there was 1980, which was very different from today. And I think that this business of supposing that non-black people aren't gonna borrow what is probably the most vibrant slang in the United States, it'll never happen. It's actually a good sign that it is happening. And it really is at the point where if you're gonna look at how modern English is changing, which is mostly the words, two times out of three, it comes from either black slang or gay black slang. That's a major source of our new words. And really, it's a word I try to avoid. Two words. Holistic, because it just makes everybody happy to hear the word holistic. And also the word dynamic.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  It's dynamic. What the hell does that mean? But I think that black English jumping into mainstream English is quite dynamic, and I enjoy watching it. So, yeah, I'm not giving the right answer, because I know there are people who think that it's appropriation. That's complicated, though, and I think

• 51:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  that's an over-application of the appropriation concept, I think.

• 51:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. We have to end sadly, but I want to ask you one last question, and that is it's my favorite question for someone like you.

• 52:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  Let's imagine you were made language czar of America with absolute powers. I want you to tell me the the three

• 52:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  Language fixes you would impose on all of us. We've done you, we want the, you want y'all, we've given that to you. I want three new ones and then we're done.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  I want people to stop saying it is what it is. Because I find that the chilliest, most dismissive expression, that's got to stop. There's something, there's something pickier. You can't just walk into this room and start yelling. That's how the sentence should be. You can't simply walk into this, you can't just walk. But everybody says, you just can't walk into this room and start yelling. That is now ordinary American English and I have no right to have any problem with it. But it's, it's kind of like you wanting the, the order in the monopoly directions. It doesn't make any sense. It's, it's, you can't just walk in, but people say just can't all the time. There was an episode of The Lucy Show where somebody did it. And so I know that it's not new.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  But it really, it hurts me. And then, let's see what else. This is one that I didn't like when I started hearing it in the nineties. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People say when they're having a conversation. They'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But they also make it in an orange color. You're trying to say something. They say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but, and it sounds pushy to me, kind of like, you shut up. And that's not what they mean. But to me, it's just one-

• 53:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  What do they mean?

• 53:40Speaker 03

  One yeah would do. What they're trying to do is take their turn in the conversation. And they say, yeah, yeah, yeah, in the same way that now both you and I probably use exclamation points in our emails when we're not exclaiming anything. It's kind of, be there in a second, ging. And so that, that has become, and so now if you want to really exclaim, if you want to say something like, the tangerine is the best flavor, then you have to use two exclamation points. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, is kind of long for what used to be just, yeah. But, it's just this kind of natural, it's kind of like, you know, sections of DNA replicating. And so that's, that was a weird analogy, but yeah.

• 54:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  No one uses more exclamation marks, points in, um, in email than me. You know this.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Are you really doing this?

• 54:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, my, I, it's so excessive. It's to the point now where I think that with people I'm regularly corresponding with, if I only use two, they'll think that I'm mad at them. And so, why is Malcolm so cold today?

• 54:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  He's cut back to two exclamation. So I got to like three and four.

• 54:46Speaker 03

  That's the way it is now.

• 54:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's completely out of control.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  And all that is, is that you're being cheery and polite. Yeah. That was not the way we wrote emails 30 years ago, or even 20. But now I'm doing the exclamation points because I'm thinking if I just have a period, it makes it look like I'm angry. And that's how punctuation changes.

• 55:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  Well, you might be angry. But you might well be angry, John.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  I have my days, but I would disguise it by using a meaningless exclamation point.

• 55:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  All right, one last one for the road.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  So it was, "You just can't." It was, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." And then there was the, what was the first thing?

• 55:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  It is what it is.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  And it is what it is. People've got to stop that. So I would have those three. And then maybe y'all.

• 55:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's the correct response to, "It is what it is, it isn't what it is." Is that what? Yeah, but, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it isn't what it is." In this case.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  See, you can't say that. What they're really saying is, "Stop." Yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, yeah. It's, "Stop talking about that." Like, "It is what it is, and therefore there's no point in dwelling on it. And now let's talk about RFK Junior," or something. And what I wanted to talk about was the tangerine ice cream. So that's how that goes.

• 56:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  John, this has been great fun. This is a wonderful book. You should all go and get it and give it to your friends as well. And thank you for joining us tonight, and thank you, Johns.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  Thank you, Muffins.

• 56:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  Thanks for listening. Coming up on Revisionist History, an episode about faces, an episode on raccoons, and another on English muffins. Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Ben Nadaf Hafry. Our editor is Karen Shakurji, mixed and mastered by Sarah Brugger, engineered by Nina Bird Lawrence, original score and music by Luis Guerra. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and Greta Kohn. I'm Malcolm Glappel.

• 57:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  A business gift should do more than check a box. It should reflect your brand and show someone they're appreciated, recognized, and truly seen. That's why Teams trust 4imprint. With thousands of high-quality customizable products like premium apparel, drinkware, tech, and more, it's easy to create a gift that feels meaningful and on-brand. And with 4imprint's expert support and their 360-degree guarantee, you can be 4imprint certain your order will arrive exactly as intended. Explore gifting with confidence at 4imprint.com. 4imprint, for certain.

• 57:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  The new Petivity Smart Feeder for Cats turns everyday meals into meaningful health insights. My cat, Biggie Smalls, is the most demanding member of our household. Last night, I introduced him to the Petivity Smart Feeder for Cats. It took no time to set up. I downloaded the app, plugged it in, filled up the feeder with delicious kibble, and watched as my cat entered the digital age. Biggie, look! All curious at it. It's his first experience with high technology. Create custom feeding schedules or dispense food on demand from anywhere. Visit petivity.com/catfeeder to learn more.

• 58:38Speaker 04

  A BetterHelp ad. I would like to formally request more storage space in my brain. Because somehow I can forget why I opened my laptop where I put my keys or the name of someone I met 30 seconds ago. But I can remember an awkward conversation from six years ago in extraordinary detail. So if your brain came with a delete button, what would you use it on? Maybe it's that tough breakup you've analyzed from every possible angle and irrational worry you know doesn't deserve this much attention. The conversation with your boss you keep rehearsing in the shower or that one comment someone made that you're still thinking about weeks later. We don't always get to choose what sticks around in our heads. BetterHelp is an online therapy platform that gives you space

• 59:21Speaker 04

  to talk about what's taking up too much of yours. BetterHelp is now in-network with more than 125 health plans, with many copays as low as $15 for eligible members. Visit BetterHelp.com. Cost and coverage may vary.