Pod Insights a16z Podcast Words of 2020! (and Metaphors, and Interfaces of the Year) About this episode with @GretchenAMcC @smc90
In a year that left us speechless, 2020 has been filled with new words unlike any other”... so it's unprecedented that for the first time, the Oxford English Dictionary did NOT name a word of the year. But do we really need the dictionaries to tell us what our words of the year are? From remote work portmanteaus to scientific discourse in a pandemic (for better and for worse) to social movements and more -- we take a whirlwind tour through the words of the year, exploring misplaced analogies, shifting metaphors, and even the evolution of interfaces and spaces.
Transcript 10,547 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Sonal? Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z Podcast. I'm Sonal and today we have a sort of holiday special episode, a real celebration, or maybe not a celebration, actually. And it's all about the key words, metaphors, and tools of the year, including, of course, the underlying tech shifts. And our guest is Gretchen McCulloch, who is widely described as an internet linguist. She has a master in linguistics and also wrote the New York Times bestselling book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, last year. And because she's so enthusiastic about linguistics, she also has a podcast that she co-created called Lingthusiasm. We spend roughly the first half of this hallway-style conversation doing a whirlwind tour through the words and metaphors of the year, chunked into the themes of remote work, the pandemic, of course, and
0:45 Sonal? scientific discourse, key cultural concepts and shifts, and a couple of quick personal favorites. And then in the second half, we go meta, probing a bit more deeply into how tech tools change conversation and social dynamics online. For further context, Gretchen also wrote an op-ed in Wired where she's a columnist on the rise of so-called proximity chat as part of her mission to make virtual parties fun, including suggesting the need for digital cheese plates, which we'll briefly talk about. So we spend some time talking about the idea of a third place and how those concepts and interfaces have evolved, along with the metaphors, ending finally on how writing itself is a technology, how it evolved, and the OG network effect of language. So that's the intro. Welcome, Gretchen.
1:30 Speaker 01 Thank you so much for having me.
1:31 Sonal? I feel like we have been longtime internet friends. It is amazing how you can really know someone through their voice, their style of speaking, their content, even if it's to quote Salman Rushdie from Midnight's Children, a sort of perforated sheet, like a slice into who they are.
1:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's this thing called a parasocial relationship. You have this sort of parasocial relationship with your TV news anchor, and it's especially common in the internet. And then when you finally meet each other, you're like, wait, actually, we could just jump right to friends.
1:57 Sonal? Oh, I love that. And it's so funny, because the theme of this episode is words of the year. And one of the words that I actually learned this year is the word parasocial. Believe it or not, that was not in my vocabulary until 2020.
2:08 Speaker 01 It must have been a couple of years ago when I learned it, but I feel like it's been becoming more prominent, maybe in the last few years.
2:13 Sonal? It's driven a lot by the underlying tech platform shifts we're seeing. In fact, let's kick off right there, which is- It's an obviously unique year. I mean, for the first time, the Oxford English Dictionary has actually chosen not to name a word of the year because they described 2020 as, quote, "a year which cannot neatly be accommodated in one single word." The president was quoted as saying in this Guardian article, "The team at Oxford were identifying hundreds of significant new words and usages as a year unfolded, dozens of which would have been a slam dunk for word of the year at any other time. It's both unprecedented and a little ironic. In a year that left us speechless, 2020 has been filled with new words unlike any other."
2:55 Speaker 01 I think that's a cop out. To some extent, the word of the year is a marketing exercise.
3:00 Sonal? Kind of like Pantone colors.
3:01 Speaker 01 It's PR for dictionary.
3:03 Sonal? Right.
3:04 Speaker 01 You know, big word wants you to think about words. And so one of the sort of interesting incentives is that each of the dictionaries want to have a different one. And one of the other things that's really interesting about the word of the year in general is that they're all sort of chosen with different processes. So the American Dialect Society process, which is the one that I know the best, is one of the more open, whereas the dictionaries tend to have more of a sort of shadowy process. You know, it's whoever works at that dictionary, whoever their lexicographers are. On the other hand, sometimes they can draw on stats. So some of the dictionaries will choose a word that's already an existing word that just has spike in lookups. Merriam-Webster has pandemic as the word of the year. Dictionary.com also declared pandemic as their word of the year.
3:48 Speaker 01 It's unusual to have that degree of consensus. I don't know what Collins has declared. And other times, you'll get the American Dialect Society, they'll try to choose a word that's new or newly prominent. I've been attending the American Dialect Society's annual meeting, which happens at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting. As of time of recording, we're in between the nominating session and the word of the year vote. So I don't know what the final word of the year is going to decide it to be, but we'll know by the time this episode goes up.
4:17 Sonal? Well, what's interesting is that almost seems like a little difference between leading versus lagging indicators. And while you did mention something that's more open versus closed. In either case, there is, especially in the dictionaries case, it's still based a lot on usage, even if they may curate and differentiate certain words. And in fact, while the Oxford dictionaries did not pick a word of the year, they did issue a report and there's a bunch of words in there that are so 2020 and I'll quickly, you know, spin through a few of them. It's obviously coronavirus, reopening made the list, lockdown, super spreader, community transmission, unmute, remote, remotely, staycation.
4:56 Speaker 01 Yeah. Other top searches from Merriam-Webster include asymptomatic quarantine and coronavirus, and COVID-19 was added within a month of its first use.
5:05 Sonal? So let's start with the whole phenomenon of technology trends and remote work.
5:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:10 Sonal? Unmute kind of cracked me up because of the Zoom, you know, phrases that are not on the list, but that I would add to the list are Zoom fatigue, zoomed out.
5:19 Speaker 01 There are a whole bunch of compound words with Zoom, you know, Zoom bombing, Zoom fatigue, also Zoomer.
5:25 Sonal? Ooh, right, Zoomer.
5:27 Speaker 01 To refer to a member of Gen Z, Gen Z, if you're Canadian like I am. Last year, some of the members of this generation were still being called Zoomers. And at the time, it was this sort of joke and play on Boomer.
5:39 Sonal? Yeah, exactly.
5:40 Speaker 01 And then this year, Zoomer got an even bigger life as a member of the generation that's attending school and college on Zoom. There was an account selling T-shirts for Zoom University because students were feeling like that's what they were attending. And this sort of a Zoom generation, I think people in the future will find it hard to believe that that generation wasn't just automatically named after Zoom.
6:03 Sonal? There's also a Zoom class for folks who have the privilege and ability to work from home and remotely, because a lot of people, essential workers, people who provide key services, a lot of those folks are out in the field. In a way that those who are remote don't. But to your point, I agree with you that in the future, this will be the default.
6:21 Speaker 01 Well, remember when millennials were called Gen Y? There was a while when millennial was called I Gen or digital natives. There were sort of various names for the generation. Then one of them sort of settled. Like Gen X is really the one where the letter moniker has stuck. And I think that's the process that we're seeing happening for the Zoomers now. Like you have this sort of placeholder letter moniker, but then you have this more unique noun name, more evocative of the particular defining moment for that generation, which it turns out to be this pandemic.
6:52 Sonal? So we've been covering the shifts of remote and online. I'm going to actually shift into a lightning round around all things COVID and pandemic. I feel like we're all a little tired of talking about it, but we would be very remiss not to put these words on the list. I'm going to do a quick hit list of all the words that came up. And by the way, I have to comment on how funny these words are because last year's, at least Oxford words, were things like chillax and whatevs making the dictionary. And I have to freaking laugh because I'm like, my God, to go from chillax and whatevs to words like coronavirus, super spreader, lockdown, social just transition. Right, exactly. Flatten the curve, shelter in place, mRNA, quarantine, R naught, pandemic, outbreak. I mean, there is quite a hit list.
7:35 Sonal? So along those lines, one of the most beautiful things, and people have observed this, so this is not an original observation, but it's important, which is this is an unprecedented year for scientific words entering the discourse. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
7:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, there are so many scientific words. I was thinking recently about fomite. A fomite transmission is like, can you get COVID from surfaces? One of the ones that struck me really early on in the pandemic, because I did some Googling about like how to make your own mask, the results that I was getting from Google were about how to make beauty masks, you know, like avocado and argan oil on your face.
8:08 Sonal? Oh, right. And now that must be totally about handmade Etsy style masks. You pointed out this idea of emojis and masks in your book.
8:14 Speaker 01 I have this line, which is the line that has aged the worst about, aren't emoji kind of disingenuous because people just put them on very deliberately? And aren't they kind of like wearing a mask? And what's to enjoy about a world where everyone's wearing a mask? Oh my god. Oops. And I have this line about how we make a sort of privacy trade off whenever we use social technology and it's too much to expect perfect privacy by never using any social tech at all because we make these sorts of trade offs all the time. Like, for example, if we wanted to never get a contagious disease, we could just not leave the house.
8:44 Sonal? That's very sadly hilarious. I think that's really funny that we've evolved. Like, we have this context of sort of this Joseph Campbell power of myth, Carl Jungian notion of mass and like Darth Vader and Star Wars. And then you have this emoji masks and then you have like beauty masks. And now we have like face masks.
9:03 Speaker 01 Phantom of the Opera masks, you know, or like masquerade. I, when, this summer, when I was having, you know, outdoor masked picnics, I put them on my Google Calendar as mask, M A S Q U E.
9:14 Sonal? Oh, that's so clever. I have to say one thing. My niece, she's five. When she graduated from kindergarten this summer, it was kind of heartbreaking for me to see her ceremony, which is like socially distant and happening in the front of my brother's house. And she's wearing a mask. It's kind of sad to me that they've normalized this word so much.
9:34 Speaker 01 My friend's two year old, like, one of this kid's first words was mask.
9:39 Sonal? Oh, man.
9:40 Speaker 01 You're like, oh, like after mama and dada, like word number 150 or so was like mask.
9:46 Sonal? So moving on to some of the other scientific words in the pandemic, one of the things that I think is also very interesting is both the increased usage of scientific words, but also the increased lack of precision. So examples I noticed very early on this year was with the words coronavirus, which is actually a broader category of coronaviruses. And we actually even broke down the taxonomy. We're one of the very first podcasts to really cover coronavirus. We recorded it mid-January and released it like the third week of January. And a lot of the detail work I did behind the scenes was adding. The taxonomy of coronavirus is triple checking the difference between the word pandemic and outbreak.
10:21 Speaker 01 When does an epidemic turn into a pandemic?
10:23 Sonal? Exactly. When does an epidemic turn into pandemic? Introducing the word, which we did not coin, but I think we're one of the first to put on a podcast that was used before even the WHO put it on their website, which is infodemic. Like infodemic is a new word for 2020, at least in my knowledge. So I find it really fascinating. I also think it's completely crazy that very wonky words like are not, which is the R and the zero next to it, that people actually know what the hell that even is? And I wonder if you have any thoughts on this sort of balance between increased ubiquitous use as well as the evolution and changing meanings that are kind of morphing in this?
10:58 Speaker 01 I think you'd have to add armchair epidemiologist to that list.
11:00 Sonal? Oh, my God, totally. I'm so glad you added that.
11:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:04 Sonal? That's a cultural phenomenon, for sure.
11:06 Speaker 01 There have been other instances where certain areas of technical vocabulary suddenly entered the mainstream, you know, like after the recession in 2008, words like quantitative easing or credit default swaps.
11:20 Sonal? Right, derivatives.
11:21 Speaker 01 Derivatives. Like, a lot of people were exposed to that sort of very technical economics vocabulary after that. And even after World War II. So something that many people don't really realize is that acronyms didn't really start becoming a thing in English until after World War II.
11:37 Sonal? I did not know that.
11:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, so acronyms like GI, GI Joe, FOobar, snafu, the ones that have F swear words in them.
11:45 Sonal? Yep.
11:46 Speaker 01 Or, you know, AWOL. A lot of these acronyms were military jargon that got brought into conventional vocabulary. Now you can say someone's gone AWOL and you aren't necessarily referring to a military context.
11:58 Sonal? Right, which is absent without leave, technically.
12:00 Speaker 01 Right, absent without leave. But now you can just say that as an idiomatic expression, or you can say that something was a snafu, and those start out as sort of military and war-based vocabulary and just could have get embedded into the cultural context. I mean, sort of in a similar way to how like baseball metaphors get embedded into context. I don't know if I've ever played baseball.
12:20 Sonal? Or even watched it. It's so boring.
12:22 Speaker 01 I've probably watched it like once, but I can talk about getting a home run or like something being way out in left field. I'm not even quite sure what left field is.
12:29 Sonal? Slugging average versus batting average.
12:31 Speaker 01 I understand the metaphor even though I don't play baseball and I don't watch baseball. In Canadian politics, there's a lot of hockey metaphors, so you can praise an MP's stick handling. Which is a hockey metaphor for them being like very good at getting difficult issues through.
12:45 Sonal? Right. Or even, even the famous Gretzky quote of skating to where the puck's gonna be.
12:50 Speaker 01 Right.
12:50 Sonal? Like, no, I've never even touched a puck, but I know what it means.
12:53 Speaker 01 Right, exactly. So you do have metaphor vocabulary from technical domains, whether that's sports, or economics, or war, or epidemiology, they do enter the mainstream. And what I think will be interesting will be to see if now that these technical terms have entered the public sphere in a way that they hadn't last year, do they become metaphors?
13:16 Sonal? Ah, that is interesting.
13:17 Speaker 01 Right?
13:18 Sonal? Yes.
13:18 Speaker 01 So if we have flatten the curve of the virus, does flatten the curve now become a metaphor that we could use for other contexts beyond the virus?
13:27 Sonal? I would add that a question that I find fascinating is of shifting baselines. You know, there's this context of like shifting baseline syndrome. And it was something that arose with an architect, and then a fisheries scientist, and then Paul Kudratsky wrote about it in like an Edge question. But one of the things that I wonder is whether not only do they become analogies that are ubiquitous in other contexts, but whether we've also shifted the baseline for upping our bar with science and knowledge around that, even if it is contentious in some cases. But at the same time, I'm also kind of frustrated by the lack of precision with words like coronavirus. And this happens to be talking about a specific type and quarantine. Like quarantine started off as a literal quarantine,
14:11 Sonal? but it's now become conflated and interchangeable with sheltering in place. So I'm curious if you have thoughts on those meanings of quarantine and coronavirus, I think are forever lost. They've now become new things.
14:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's, there was, there was actually an X K C D comic about this, early on in the pandemic, talking about the coronavirus and pointing out that you can say something like the car in a context where you know what the car means. Doesn't mean that there are no other cars, but in this particular context, you know which car you mean when you say the car.
14:40 Sonal? Oh, I can't believe I missed that. I love his work.
14:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's really great. So yeah, I think, I think we can talk about the coronavirus, but I didn't even know that coronaviruses were a thing before this. Like, I'd heard of rhinoviruses vaguely. But now, not only do I know that we have a new one that's sort of devastating everything, but also I know that there are more of them.
14:57 Sonal? It might also be an artifact of location and geography, because I've traveled towards the east many times, and I've traveled during both SARS and MERS. And so I did know what coronaviruses were, because they're on the CDC recommendations and websites. But I did not know the, the variety taxonomy details and level of detail, for sure, that I do this year. I mean, this year has been war.
15:17 Speaker 01 There has been some interesting work in the linguistics-ish community about, should we be using war as a metaphor for the virus?
15:24 Sonal? Oh, can you say more about that?
15:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:26 Sonal? I had no idea.
15:27 Speaker 01 So there's been a lot of discussion of things like frontline workers, right? Which is a war metaphor to say, oh, these people are like doctors and nurses and so on are on the front line. But unlike people in the military, they didn't volunteer to be on this kind of frontline and to be sort of sacrificed for the greater good. That's not what they even thought they were signing up for. I mean, they knew there was some degree of risk. So there was a paper who, I can't remember the author, talking about, should we be using a war metaphor here, or should we be using something more like a fire metaphor? If we talk about the coronavirus as a fire, like a forest fire, then we can talk about sort of outbreaks as like flare ups in particular areas. And we need to devote resources to extinguish the fire or quench the fire and doing these sort of things like shelter in
16:09 Speaker 01 place. And shelter in place is originally a sort of fire or natural disaster type metaphor, because if we talk about COVID as more in, in terms of a natural disaster, it maybe is less polarizing. A lot of people have been reaching back to World War II and saying, oh, well, you know, the, the Allies and the Axis forces in World War II, they declared a truce over Christmas. Can't we declare truce over Christmas for the virus? And the problem is, is like, the virus does not celebrate Christmas. The virus is not a Christian. The virus does not celebrate any holidays. And it might be easier to understand that for World War II. There were many problems, but they did understand holidays. Whereas a forest fire, it's more intuitive that a forest fire does not celebrate Christmas.
16:51 Sonal? It's like, well, it's also like natural versus unnatural. And that actually is a great segue to some non-pandemic words of the year.
17:00 Sonal? And the first one I want to start off with is bushfire, because that came up in one of the Oxford reports for 2020 is a very frequently increased word because of the bushfires in Australia. Of course, sitting here in California, I'm thinking of the fact that a lot of Californians were contending with local fires. And that was a really big deal. So just a really important shout out to our firefighters. But it really had an impact on a lot of people, both in terms of smoke and experiencing it, losing homes. That was another word of the year, which is not pandemic, but was another one of these like OMG 2020 things. Any thoughts on that word?
17:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. There's a bit of a link between bushfires and COVID in the sense that people are paying a lot more closer attention to things like air quality.
17:43 Sonal? Uh huh.
17:43 Speaker 01 You know, like I'd only vaguely heard of a HEPA filter before this year.
17:47 Sonal? Oh, you must not suffer from dust mite allergies. And let me tell you, we know all about HEPA filters.
17:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, HEPA filters, it was something that was more, I'm married or more this year than it was previously. And like N95 masks and, you know, people getting things like pulse oximeters, which is not relevant to the fires, but also things like CO2 meters and air quality index meters, all of those sorts of measurement types of things. Like I now know way more about CO2 levels than, and what they should be indoors and stuff like that than I, than I had before. And what kinds of microscopic particles there are and like, what all the different sizes are and how they interface with masks.
18:22 Sonal? I think that's an interesting observation about the increased instrumentation as a result. What do you make of the word doom scrolling? That for me was something that is definitely a 2020 word. I would put that on my word of the year for 2020.
18:35 Speaker 01 I, I felt like I'd encountered it before.
18:37 Sonal? I'm like a slow, slow laggard here.
18:39 Speaker 01 You had the HEPA filters, though. You had the HEPA filters.
18:42 Sonal? Much rather have.
18:43 Speaker 01 Would you rather have doom scrolling?
18:45 Sonal? Actually, you're right. Let's, let's keep it the way we have it.
18:47 Speaker 01 Both bad. Everything is bad. I don't have details for doom scrolling. I know it's on the American Dialect Society list of candidate words. I definitely think doom scrolling has become a lot more popular this year. It didn't feel entirely new to me, but that's just maybe, you know, time is, time is a blur. Blur's day is another one that's come up. I don't know what day is it? Wednesday, Thursday is blur's day. I don't care.
19:09 Sonal? Okay. How about moonshot? The Oxford dictionaries added this in their report this year. And I was very surprised by this because moonshot. Literally is like from Kennedy era.
19:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, it may be that one of those cases of sometimes dictionaries really wait around on a word and they'll keep an eye on it for a number of years or even decades to see if it has staying power.
19:29 Sonal? That's so funny to track a word. That's great.
19:32 Speaker 01 Oh, oh, no, there are, there are whole people who track words and they'll kind of have, have a list of like words that we're tracking that we haven't quite reached the evidence threshold of whether it goes in a dictionary or not. Because if you have a word that's just very avancend of its moment, or say I coined a really funny word, but no one else uses it, it doesn't get added. And words like COVID got added very quickly because even though they were coined by like a person or a committee of people, it's was very apparent that everyone would be using them. But a word like moonshot, I don't know specifically what the decision process was like there, but wait, we should just add it because it's, it's still being used.
20:06 Sonal? I care about this in the context of technology innovation advancement. I did an op ed at Wired, incidentally, which was from Astro Teller, who's the head of Google X. And it was about this idea of what makes a moonshot. And I'm like, this is one of those jargony, like innovation consulting words. And he outlined what he thinks makes a moonshot. And his qualities were that you not only have to have a big idea, but that you have to have a indicator of that idea, even though it's big and way in the future, being very really possible today, and then what you would have to do to get there. So I kind of love that for something so jargony, it has like, in his context, at least a level of formula to it. And in fact, we had a podcast last year that we did with Safi Bakal, who wrote a book called Loon Shot.
20:50 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah.
20:50 Sonal? Which is not quite moonshots, but kind of crazy loony ideas and how they play out. So that's another new word.
20:57 Speaker 01 I wonder if the figurative use of moonshot is probably newer than the literal use?
21:02 Sonal? Yes.
21:03 Speaker 01 So what may have been the case, especially with a word like this, is that the, the physical use of moonshot, as in we go to the moon, may have been around for a long time. And I don't know about Oxford specifically, that may have already been there. And they may have added a figurative definition for it.
21:16 Sonal? That's a really good point. God, I love talking to a linguist.
21:19 Speaker 01 This is what I do.
21:20 Sonal? Well, I'm going to now shift gears to some words that are really important in the culture. The discussions are way too complex to represent in a conversation that we've decided to spend most of the bulk on with tech trends and pandemic words. But just to get some quick lightning round takes, there's quite a few words that make the list. So BIPOC, you know, for Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Maalyn was increased in usage on the Oxford report. QAnon increased while Brexit, interestingly, decreased by 80%. So there's some of the, that's some of the stats that came up. But cancel culture, that is a phrase that really has gone to a new level this year.
21:57 Speaker 01 So cancel culture made the American Dialect Society Word of the Year list a year or two ago. It's come up a few times.
22:03 Sonal? Oh, I did not know that.
22:04 Speaker 01 It's been around for a while. BIPOC is interesting because there's some disagreement about what it means. Some people use it to refer to Black and Indigenous people of color, specifically as a subgroup of people of color. And some people use it to refer to Black and Indigenous and people of color as a larger macro group. And so observe which of those meanings, where that ends up sort of going. I think the sort of general trend towards using BIPOC is partly that words that refer to people who are marginalized kind of undergo a sort of replacement every few years because
22:37 Sonal? Yeah.
22:37 Speaker 01 the old ones feel like they get tainted with the marginalizations that happen. But we need a new one because that will come in without some of the baggage. And then it acquires the societal baggage of people using it disingenuously or people maybe kind of well-intentioned but not very well-executed diversity initiatives over using words. And then you have to replace it with something else to get away from those connotations.
23:01 Sonal? Okay. So now the last category, quick grab bag, personal words of the year. So for me, in the category of today I learned, or this year I learned, YIL, the word simp. And it's really funny because actually a podcast fan wrote me and said, hey, I'm a huge simp for your episodes. And I had to look it up and it has a very interesting connotation and kind of S and M, like sadomasochistic context. And I was like, uh, what is he saying? But then like some of my Gen Z friends in my feed are like, this is a compliment. Like simp is actually not used in that S and M context. It's actually just saying he's a huge fan.
23:36 Speaker 01 Simp is sort of the new stan, if you will. Simp is one of the ones that has longer roots in African American English and then gets kind of imported into into the mainstream. And it's not so much an internet trend, even though it can be mediated by the internet, but there's a much older than internet tradition of appropriating cultural items from African American English.
23:55 Sonal? Right. And yet another place where black culture really leads the way.
23:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:58 Sonal? In a way that's not often recognized or compensated. One personal word for me this year has been the word desi, which basically means like this or like homeland. And I was born and raised in the United States, but this is a year where I've noticed desi as a term get more broadly used in my non desi friends. It's like super exciting for me to see a word that was so insular and sometimes even has other negative connotations. Like there's a connotation of quote, fresh off the boat, which some people think of disparagingly. I wonder if you've also heard of the word desi enough, also if you have any words that you would add to your personal list.
24:33 Speaker 01 I'm just enjoying your pronunciation of that first consonant because, you know, as a person who doesn't speak any languages of the Indian subcontinent, I would say desi or desi, but I think you're doing it as a retroflex. Desi? Is that how you're doing it? Or are you doing it as a dental desi?
24:47 Sonal? You almost, you almost got it perfectly. It's a little bit between those. Desi.
24:51 Speaker 01 Desi? Okay.
24:52 Sonal? Thank you for asking.
24:53 Speaker 01 So I'm just sitting here paying so much attention to this consonant right now. That's, this is what happens when you hang out with me as I listen to your consonants rather than the content of what you're saying.
25:02 Sonal? Well, and also when you hear a word versus only read it, which is how many of us learn words.
25:05 Speaker 01 Because I primarily read it online, but I don't know if I've seen it used, like I trust your reporting of having seen it more. I've definitely seen it for a number of years now, but I think of it as something that I've been exposed to more on social media because you can follow people from a bunch of different. Backgrounds and life experiences that you don't necessarily have yourself and find out things about how people are talking about themselves. Like, I don't know if I would do that as an outsider to this community. Sometimes a word that can be a sign of intimacy or can be a sign of an in-group can also be exclusionary when it's used or insulting when it's used outside of that group. I think one of the simplest examples is endearment. Like, if you call somebody honey, or sweetie, or baby, or whatever, that can be really nice if it's used with somebody that you're in, that's in your family, or that you're, that you're dating, or something like that.
25:48 Sonal? Right.
25:49 Speaker 01 But if you call a random person that on the street, that's not the same thing.
25:52 Sonal? No, I'm really glad you brought that up.
25:54 Speaker 01 And that there's a different power dynamic, there's a different pre-existing relationship there.
25:57 Sonal? That's a wonderful way of putting it. So, do you have a word that is your personal pet word of the year?
26:02 Speaker 01 I've been having fun with some of the sort of novel coinages around, I like, I like a portmanteau words. And some of the ones that I've been having fun with this year are things like quarantimes.
26:12 Sonal? Quarantine times, great. What are some of the other combos you love? Earlier, you mentioned some of the Zoom combos, which I love, like Zoom bombing, you know, they're not, that's not so great if it's porn, but like-
26:21 Speaker 01 No, it's not a fun phenomenon, but at least we have an interesting word for it.
26:25 Sonal? Yeah, exactly.
26:26 Speaker 01 Covidian, which isn't quite a portmanteau. It's kind of just the ending, but you know the tweet template where you can have like tired this, wired this?
26:36 Sonal? Yes.
26:36 Speaker 01 You can have quotidian times this, covidian times that. In a year that has not had enough joy, coining weird words based on this thing that we all can't stop thinking about has been giving me a very small amount of it.
26:50 Sonal? So, just to switch gears, and I want to go back to level back up. So, your book, Because Internet, it actually cuts across many applications and use cases, which is really because language is everywhere. It's everything we do. It's really about culture, but it's also about technology. And in fact, it's mediated by the tools we have. So, I want to get some of your thoughts on this meta-theme of language, because we've been talking about words. But now, let's talk about language itself as a social technology.
27:17 Speaker 01 It's interesting to see, what's been really difficult about this year is that there's a thing that sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a third place, which I also talk about in my book, In the Digital Context. Which is all of those sort of like unplanned encounters with people neither at the home nor at the workplace where you run into people potentially over and over again, and you gradually develop this sort of friendship.
27:41 Sonal? I want to hear more about how you think this is playing out, particularly now, because third place is actually an old concept from Oldenburg, who I think first wrote about in the 80s and 90s.
27:49 Speaker 01 Right. Oldenburg does not write about third places technologically mediated. He talks about like pubs and barber shops and bowling alleys. And spoken clubs. And spoken clubs. He doesn't seem to really like pay attention to where women could have third places, but I think the concept is still valid. You can draw on that list of examples and expand it. And one of the things that I think is interesting about how younger people, their generation is being shaped by the pandemic, is the socialization aspect that online classes are not really doing a particularly good job of providing. Where like you attend university, not just to get an education or to get a degree, but also because you want to make friends, go to parties. And universities are set up with
28:30 Speaker 01 quads and common rooms and dorms and activities and clubs. And people think about architecturally designing places for third spaces. I think Steve Jobs famously had like the restrooms placed at a very inconvenient central location for everybody so that people could run into each other spontaneously on the way to and from the bathrooms, which is a sort of way of designing for third spaces in a company context.
28:53 Sonal? Oh, my God. I mean, I used to work at Xerox PARC, as the listeners know, because I often mention it. It was very formative in my work experience. But one of the things that the building has is very long hallways. And I remember when I met Bob Metcalfe, one of the co inventors of the Ethernet, at our anniversary celebration a number of years ago, he was joking about how they kind of invented the Ethernet because it was a way to connect the hallways and people across the individual spaces. So the hallway is a third place in that context.
29:20 Speaker 01 Right. The hallway is a third place. A conference is also a third place. What I do is I hang out in the hallways and I run into people. And I think we really lose sight of that when we just try to replicate the programming. You know, people have been trying to replicate in lockdown, okay, let's try to do these parties. But the thing that Miss about a party is being able to wander from conversation to conversation and join in with some people for a little while. And then you go to the kitchen to get snacks and then you join a different conversation, having that experience of wandering in between.
29:50 Sonal? Yep.
29:50 Speaker 01 So I've started experimenting with proximity chat platforms or spatial audio. They're called various different things.
29:57 Sonal? In your recent op ed in Wired, you talk about how one of the defining characteristics of a party is this ability to have multiple options for different types of conversations.
30:06 Speaker 01 So I did a lot of reading of the work of Robin Dunbar, who's best known for Dunbar's number, You Know 150. And he has all these papers, which I read a lot of. And the interview didn't make it into the Wired article. Turns out Dunbar also has other numbers. And one of them is four, the number of people that a conversation tends to max out at before it splits into smaller sub-conversations again. And the reason they think this is the case is because if you prompt people to talk about an absent third party, and either you can talk about facts, this person arrived, this person left, or you can talk about that absent third party's mental state, you know, they must have been thinking this when they blah,
30:48 Speaker 01 blah, blah. The conversation's size maximum shrinks down to three. So it's how many people's minds are you trying to hold in your head at the same time?
30:57 Sonal? Fascinating.
30:58 Speaker 01 And to me, this explains some of the Zoom fatigue. I mean, there are other factors as well. Seeing video of yourself is really awkward.
31:04 Sonal? Yes.
31:05 Speaker 01 But holding in too many people's mental states is also overtaxing your brain for something you weren't designed to do. And your body like protects you from doing it in physical space by subdividing conversations.
31:17 Sonal? You know, one thing that I think I would push back on, though, is that with a lot of these first phases of technology tools, like we're in the early era of spatial audio here.
31:25 Speaker 01 Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
31:26 Sonal? And in this context, I would say a lot of the limitations you're describing are very much an artifact of the current implementations. And much like popular numbers like six degrees of connection and other things were debunked when they moved away from letters to actually internet scale and speed. I actually believe that our capacity is much broader. I mean, besides the N equals one logic of I have seen this and experienced it firsthand.
31:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:48 Sonal? I've been in clubhouse rooms with like 20 people. And you can have very intimate, very deep, very thoughtful conversations. I think the design.
31:56 Sonal? And interaction matters. And I wonder if some of this limitation that Dunbar is describing is both a limitation of evolution and also a limitation of the current evolution of tools. And so I actually wonder if that number will be much higher as these tools evolve in the future.
32:12 Speaker 01 Well, I don't know, because Dunbar has multiple numbers. So there's four and there's 150, but he also has like 12 to 15 is another number for another reason, and 50 is another number for another reason, and 150 and 500 is another number for another reason. And so I wonder if those rooms are just a different experience to having that particular type of conversation.
32:33 Sonal? So like a taxonomy of types than just like the artifact of the numbers?
32:37 Speaker 01 If you have a room where you have 20 people having a conversation, they're having a different kind of conversation than you would with just four people.
32:44 Sonal? That actually expands the very definition of conversation. And in fact, to your work, we don't have enough words to describe this heterogeneity and variety of types of conversations. We have this one word, like conversation, or we have a word like chat. And spatial audio does not do it any kind of justice, because that is actually a technology underlying medium that's even being used in Apple's new headphones. This idea of immersive audio, spatial audio, like it means a lot of different things. But the heart of all of this is both the words and technologies are mediums for connection and intimacy. How would you define proximity chat?
33:21 Speaker 01 I use proximity chat to mean chat where you have some sort of notion of physical proximity, and that affects who you're able to talk with. There are different platforms that do it differently. Some of them are audio only, some of them are audio and video. But one that I've been playing around with a lot is called Gather. I don't know if there are any that are video only. I guess that might be kind of hard unless you're all speakers of a sign language.
33:45 Sonal? I want to ask you something about this notion of when you say proximity. What is a quote room on the internet? Because you describe in your Wired op-ed, two kinds of metaphors, like the metaphor of a table, the metaphor of a map. I'm actually more interested in what might be other metaphors.
34:02 Speaker 01 I think there's still sort of an open Question there of exactly what we mean by room and different platforms means slightly different things. Like a window is a metaphor, a tab is a metaphor.
34:12 Sonal? Yes.
34:12 Speaker 01 We don't think of them as metaphors anymore. And so we're in this really interesting emergent state with proximity platforms where we're trying to figure out through the skeuomorphism of like, we have tables and we have rooms and we have maps, which of these things are going to become sort of invisibilized metaphors like windows and which of these things are going to become sort of discarded metaphors? Which of these things that'll stick around is really interesting.
34:34 Sonal? Do you have any theories or pet ideas there?
34:36 Speaker 01 So I think rooms is already partway there. In some of the proximity chat platforms, not everyone in a room can necessarily talk to each other because you still have sort of a more local circle around you. In the IRC room metaphor, a room is a bunch of people who can all talk to each other at once. It's a way of clustering people. And a Zoom breakout room is also a bunch of people who can all talk to each other at once. Chat rooms in some respect are very old.
35:01 Sonal? Yep. I would even go further than back than chat because, you know, again, from Xerox PARC, one of my former colleagues was a pioneer in the field of human computer interaction. His name is Stuart Card. And he wrote an article with Austin Henderson. It was in ACM Transactions on Graphics in like July 1986. And it was called Rooms, The Use of Multiple Virtual Workspaces to Reduce Space Contention in a Window-Based Graphical User Interface. And it's really fascinating because the metaphor of rooms goes back that far. It was actually one of the early precursors to windows.
35:35 Speaker 01 And what was he using rooms to mean in that context? So like a cluster of windows?
35:39 Sonal? It was like windows, like doors essentially into a user interface. But what I love about it is it shows the evolution of how one word over time can mean so many different things.
35:47 Speaker 01 Right.
35:48 Sonal? Back then, rooms are like doors into the graphical user interface or spaces, really. Today, we're talking about rooms. You've described like the map face, the table, kind of the rooms of third places, which is taking phrases from the 80s and 90s and reapplying on the internet. And this goes back to the idea of a hallway again. And you've also described in your book, Oldenburg's work about the third place and this idea that consciousness of conditions and time often slip away. Amid its lively flow, Oldenburg quoted that and you quoted him. It's how people often experience these spaces is that they're immersive to the point where time and boundaries, i.e. the four walls of a room melt away.
36:29 Sonal? So I just think it's fascinating because we're essentially describing this incredibly fluid metaphor for rooms and then hallways, and they're all kind of floating, blending into each other.
36:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think of hallways as really neat because a hallway is not a destination of itself. It's being on the way to something else, right? Somewhere that you have an official reason to be. So a hallway conversation is always accidental. It's a gift.
36:53 Sonal? You know, it's really funny because on the A6 and Z podcast, we even have a category of conversations that I've dubbed hallway conversations because they're like these sort of weird, windy, like not as, you know, not as organized conversations, which who knows what any conversations are.
37:07 Speaker 01 With the online space, it's hard to have those conversations in a non-scheduled way. If you want to video chat with someone, you need to like reach out to them.
37:16 Sonal? For sure. In fact, we've talked a lot about remote work tools and that tooling is just evolving. And among the tools that we use, one of them is Tandem, which essentially tries to replicate kind of these water cooler type of ambient intimacy of cubicles and people hanging out.
37:31 Speaker 01 Exactly.
37:32 Sonal? What about your idea of having a cheese plate, like a virtual cheese plate?
37:35 Speaker 01 There have been some really interesting experiments with that. There's one really neat experiment by M. Laser Walker, who did this for the Rogue-like Celebration, which is a virtual conference that I didn't attend, but M. made this really cool virtual world for it. And what that place had was an emoji bar. And what you could do is you could go to the bar and you could ask the emoji bot to serve you an emoji. And the bot will give you a random emoji, but you could ask it as many times as you wanted to until you got one you liked, and then it would be added to your username.
38:04 Sonal? Oh, interesting.
38:06 Speaker 01 And you would walk around and then other people would see you and be like, oh, my God, you have a penguin. I have a penguin too. And you would give you something to talk about, or somebody could say like, hey, how did you get that apple? I want an apple. And you'd be like, oh, here you go to this bar. And if you get kind of bored of a conversation and just in a polite way, you can say, oh, I'm just going to go get a new emoji. So like, how could you do this? I think one thing that's useful is to have multiple sort of focal points. So you have this one emoji bar, which is a sort of fun focal point. But maybe there's this sort of very functional thing. I need to go consult the schedule and the schedule lives over here. It's another virtual object in a different corner of the virtual space to have a reason to move from point A to point B so that you might encounter somebody else between point A and point B.
38:50 Speaker 01 Because you need like logical pretext to be there so that you can run into people illogically.
38:57 Sonal? We should set all the creative product designers and technologists onto the problem, sociologists, anyone who studies, anyone who has ideas, fresh approaches and see what emerges because some of this might be also internet native. Like it may not even have to be oriented in physical, in real life examples, although I do agree that a lot of this is very much trained by how we evolve in person. I'm curious if this could have like a non-sceumorphic like evolution. Like we might see very emergent new things come up, especially as new tools give us new ways.
39:28 Speaker 01 Yeah. How could we take advantage of the things that the internet does offer us as a medium and really use them to their full extent? Because if I get coffee with a new person who's really interesting, we're talking about all this cool stuff on the internet. And then when we leave, it's like, okay, let me text you the three links that I mentioned. Whereas if you're on video chat with someone, you can put a link in the chat and it's non-disruptive. But one of the analogies that I've been using is I think of pandemic precaution mediated interactions, if you will, whether seeing a person face to face, but with masks on or, you know, virtually or whatever. I think of them as kind of having a lower oxygen content than traditional kind of social interactions. You have to breathe more.
40:10 Sonal? Yep.
40:10 Speaker 01 Just to get the baseline level of oxygen that you're used to. And now I really need to make sure that I get some social interaction every day. You know, in the summertime, you have to remind yourself to drink more water. Partly because I'm not getting as much incidental on the way to other things. So the level of social oxygen is so low.
40:29 Sonal? Along those lines, it's really interesting because one of the key words 2020 is the phrase AFK for away from keyboard, which yes, people have used previously. But this year I have seen the usage of that anecdotally at least multiply exponentially.
40:43 Speaker 01 AFK, I'm also seeing offline being used more. I'm going to be offline. But one of the things that is shifting in the year of the pandemic is we're no longer treating the offline world as the default world.
40:57 Sonal? Yes.
40:57 Speaker 01 It's almost the inverse. It's that if you've detached yourself from being offline, even partially, that's the non default behavior that needs to be called out. One of the things that I very carefully didn't do in because internet, uh, which is a sort of an absence that isn't noticeable until you pointed out, maybe, is I didn't use terms like I R L or real life to refer to the offline world because online is still the real world.
41:24 Sonal? Nathan Jurgensen used to write a lot about this idea of the false digital dualism between I R L and online. And what you're basically arguing is that this year it's been more inverted. And you argued previously that this might become our new normal, particularly in the context of the zoomer generation.
41:40 Speaker 01 I think the zoomer generation are stuck in this new normal, but I, I don't think they're particularly happy with it.
41:45 Sonal? That's absolutely true, maybe for things like school and some of the other things. But when you really think about online gaming worlds, like my nephew spends hours, some of that socialization you're talking about is happening there in spades.
41:55 Speaker 01 Absolutely, it's happening and online friends are real friends. You can be friends with someone you haven't met.
42:00 Sonal? Right, exactly.
42:01 Speaker 01 But just as it would be wrong to say that online isn't real life, it's all, it would also be misplaced to say that therefore we have no need of the physical world at all.
42:10 Sonal? Ah, I love that nuance. So basically they're blending more. They are distinct things, but it's also not right to deposition one or the other. And they have unique things to offer.
42:19 Speaker 01 Exactly. One of the things that I find really interesting is there's a sort of level at which technology gets invisibilized, right? Where you don't think of something as technology. There's the like, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but also any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature is the other version of that quote.
42:40 Sonal? Yes, we talked about this on the, the textiles episode that you loved.
42:43 Speaker 01 Right, I listened to the textiles episode. It was one of the reasons I wanted to, to come on the show.
42:47 Sonal? You have a quote in your book where you say,
42:50 Speaker 01 Writing is a technology. We've never encountered a society of humans that doesn't have some form of language. Language itself is not a technology, but writing is. And it gets influenced by the tools used to make it. Writing is a thing that you can trace exactly how it spreads, like the way that textiles spread. And there have only been three or possibly four ancient writing systems of people who invented writing from scratch. You have the Sumerians, you have the Old Chinese, and you have in Mesoamerica, the Olmecs, sort of pre-Zapotec and Maya civilizations. And each of them has sort of come up with the idea of like, what if we represented language in a physical form?
43:35 Speaker 01 And then those tend to spread to neighboring civilizations. So the possible fourth one is the Egyptians, who might have been inspired in their hieroglyphs from the Sumerians and might not have been. It's unclear because of course, we don't have written records of it. And from there, writing spreads as a technology. So like cuneiform is made by stamping a reed onto a clay tablet. And if you look at cuneiform, cuneiform is all encoded into Unicode. So if you go to the insert symbol menu in a Word document and you look up cuneiform, you can see all these cuneiform symbols because they're all in Unicode. It's great. Love that. I love this so much. You can, you can type out, you know, ancient Sumerian curses or something. I don't know if they're curses, but they might be, watch out. And they've got, the base is this sort of weird elongated triangle.
44:20 Speaker 01 And you're like, why do they have all these, these triangles? And that's because that's the shape of a cross section of a reed, a river reed. Right. That they cut across and they would press into the clay tablets and then bake them. It's much easier to do stamp, stamp, stamp. But if you're going to paint, then it's much easier to do these long swoopy lines. If you're going to carve something, it's much easier to carve straight lines than it is to carve curves. And so the shapes of writing systems are influenced by the specific tools, you know, pens and carving devices and things like that. And paper versus stone or wood or clay that you press them into. This goes beyond medium message. It goes beyond tools.
45:00 Sonal? And constraints, it's really going back to this big idea of writing is a technology and and really being formed and evolved by it.
45:09 Speaker 01 And one of the things that happens is that letter shapes start evolving differently when the printing press gets introduced. The printing press means, first of all, there's a much higher barrier to entry for introducing new symbols because you have to cast them out of metal.
45:23 Sonal? Right.
45:24 Speaker 01 Like a lot of our symbols, you know, the ampersand, the percent sign and stuff, they come from the pre-printing press era when you could still do that sort of physical form innovation. And the printing press codifies a lot of it and reduces it. Like, we used to have several other letters in English that we don't have right now. And one of them was thorn. You use it in words like the and this and stuff like this. But the printing presses that were imported from continental Europe didn't have thorn. And so printers started using different characters. One of them was TH, and one of them was Y, because Y kind of looks like another character, when, and so that's why you see like ye old tea shop? Because that thorn was being replaced by this Y, but it was never pronounced ye old tea shop.
46:07 Speaker 01 It was always pronounced the old tea shop, but they just used the Y for a few years because they were figuring out what conventions to use.
46:13 Sonal? It's a case where the technology really is accelerating and leading the shape of the words and language.
46:19 Speaker 01 It has this direct influence. And pre-printing press, you don't see as much spelling standardization. And then the printing press creates this sort of notion of centralized control over you have one printer or a smaller number of typesetters who are typesetting a larger number of authors. Like, copy editing doesn't exist before there's copies. And in the internet context, you have a lot fewer barriers to distribution because you don't have to go through an editor, you don't have to go through a typesetter in order to send a tweet. So you have this sort of return to a decentralization of control, which, you know, you could say, you could make a story of declining standards, blah, blah, blah, but these standards themselves were imposed at a particular moment in history and haven't always existed.
47:00 Sonal? You can draw a line from pre-printing press to printing press to movable type and the idea of blogging to internet speak. It makes you realize it's all kind of this ongoing evolution. You have a whole chapter in your book devoted to memes and internet culture. But the aspect that I care about in this context is more the remix culture, especially when you described uniforms earlier and this idea in your book about the evolution of memes evolving from layering text on image to now more text labeling of objects in relation to each other. I wonder if you have any thoughts on the anatomy of a meme here?
47:33 Speaker 01 Well, the bit about memes that I don't get to in the book was the sort of further development of memes in the TikTok meme sense, where the audio provides the template and then you do your riff on it through the video side. That's a sort of labeling aspect. You're using the audio as your, as your template. Whereas in a, in an image meme, you use the image as a template and you put words on top of it. But what I think is interesting about memes and why I wanted to talk about them in a book about language is that language is also part of this remix culture. And this gets us to this point about language as, you know, something participatory, language as an open source project. You know, you're contributing to this open source project every time you say something.
48:16 Sonal? You made an observation which really struck me in your book, which is language as a network. And one of the things you do is cite one of my favorite sociologist's work, Mark Granovetter. And I've always been a huge fan of his work, along with Ron Bird's work on structural holes, but his work on weak ties and strong ties and networks. And you make a super interesting observation that languages like English, there's this interesting network effect of people who are leaders and loners. And loners often introduce words and leaders spread them. And that in fact, language is sort of this combination of that. Like, I just love this idea of language as a network, especially in this age of online, unprecedented social coming together.
48:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, so people often think of language as being kind of contained in a sufficiently large book. But if you think about sort of the dynamism of the internet, where links between websites are constantly changing and shifting, and it would be absurd to be like, oh, I've created this offline snapshot, even of like Wikipedia, and now that's, that's it. We've got it all. We don't have this sort of permanent view of what the internet looks like. And there are some like pages that are created as you search for them. Like when you get zero Google results, that page is created for you as you search for it. It didn't already exist before you searched for it. So there's an online dictionary called Wordnik.
49:36 Sonal? Oh, I know Wordnik. That's Aaron McKean's project, right?
49:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's Aaron McKean's dictionary. And Wordnik, if there are no search results, there's no such thing as a kind of 401, like this word not found. It's sort of closer to a Wikipedia's style of what do you want to put here? And I think of that question of like, but is this a word? I'm like, well, you just used it as a word, so it's a word now. Even if it wasn't 30 seconds ago, it's a word now that you've used it.
49:59 Sonal? We're constructing it as we go.
50:01 Speaker 01 You are constructing it as we go. And we think of this as a feature of the internet. Like, the internet would be so much more boring if we weren't constructing it as we go. You know, what if we, what if we only let like a few people edit the internet for us?
50:14 Sonal? Right, exactly. We wouldn't get a, we wouldn't even get a freaking word of the year, for God's sake.
50:20 Speaker 01 We wouldn't even get a word of the year. What if we only let, you know, the people in Oxford who are lovely, what if we only let them edit the internet for us? And yet people want the dictionary to sort of give them that sort of permission of like, well, they're telling me what the words are. No, you decide what the words are. You create the words as you say them. Some words are better known than others, but you pulled this word into existence by wondering about it. And I think that's magical.
50:43 Sonal? I think that's absolutely magical. I do love the fact that people can make a word their own meaning in a way that is like grounded. It doesn't, should not be completely untethered from reality, obviously, versus others defining it for you through their words. Because sometimes words, as you know better than anyone, have tremendous power, for better and worse. Along those lines, I want to actually quote something you said in your book, Back to You, which is, "Whatever else is changing, for good or bad, in the world, the continued evolution of language is neither the solution to all our problems nor the cause of them. It simply is." And I think that's a beautiful way to end, especially on this episode that is about words of the year in what's been a crazy, unprecedented year. Thank you so much for joining the A6 and Z podcast.
51:26 Speaker 01 Thank you so much for having me.
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