Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish No Such Thing As Gutter Ice About this episode Sally Phillips joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss Greenlandic traditions, Australian accents and British Airways.
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Transcript 10,637 words · 7 speakers
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0:29 Speaker 01 Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish. Dan and James here. We're just very excited to let you know about our guest this week because it's a classic.
0:38 Speaker 02 Absolutely. We're most excited because Andy isn't here, but we are excited about our guest, who was the incredible, wonderful Sally Phillips. The great thing about Sally is she came on the show, she's got nothing to plug. I mean, you could Google her and find out everything about her, but she just came on because she loves knowledge, she loves the research period. I think she prefers the research part to actually doing the show. She just goes down all these incredible rabbit holes and she's just the best person to podcast with.
1:06 Speaker 01 I know. She came into the office saying, "I'm so sorry, I haven't had any time to do research for the show." She had more notes than any of us. She had like 20 pages. Sure, they're in size 25 font, but they were there. She does her stuff.
1:20 Speaker 02 The show is really, really fun. I'm absolutely certain you're going to enjoy it. If you would like to hear more, then you could go to Patreon. If you go to patreon.com/nosuchthingasafish, you could join one of our tiers, and the middle tier will have an Excel version of this show, which I can exclusively reveal, has an incredible anecdote about Bob Marthmar in it that there was no space for in this edit.
1:43 Speaker 01 But also, you can just join our Patreon for free, and if you do that this week, you're going to find a little bonus video. It is of Sally taking a Bible and predicting our fortunes. It was nuts. It's really fun. You can watch that there now, so go check that out. And if you want to follow Sally, she's on Instagram, so follow @sallysmack. She's always doing amazing projects. She's always in brilliant TV shows and brilliant movies. She's just awesome, so go say hi there. But enjoy her here now on No Such Thing as a Fish. Okay, on with the episode.
2:14 Speaker 02 On with the podcast.
2:31 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Holborn. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Sally Phillips. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Sally.
2:56 Speaker 03 Well, I've been interested in Greenland for obvious reasons this week, and I came across a fact that Greenlanders start their new year countdown 14,410 seconds before midnight.
3:13 Speaker 02 Brilliant.
3:14 Speaker 04 Well, you've got to make the time pass somehow. I imagine it's pretty cold and dark for a long time, and so that'll be a fun evening's activity.
3:21 Speaker 03 And that is because they currently are attached, part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and Denmark celebrates midnight several hours before them. And so if they attach to the United States, they would be celebrating midnight, at midnight and at 3am.
3:39 Speaker 02 They'd have to do Pacific, Eastern, Central and Hawaii, presumably.
3:43 Speaker 03 Well, I looked up Washington, how long it would be, three hours from Washington.
3:47 Speaker 04 It's another good reason not to do it. You know, we don't need any more reasons.
3:50 Speaker 01 But this new year thing is not dissimilar to what I'm currently doing, which is the fake new year at 8pm for all the kids. And then you do the 12pm. It's probably not too dissimilar a time difference.
4:02 Speaker 04 I will say, Sally, it's quite risky doing a section on Greenland, because we did a section on Venezuela several weeks ago with Michael Palin, and then soon afterwards, the unpleasantness happened.
4:12 Speaker 02 We're just working our way through all the new states, aren't we, of America?
4:15 Speaker 03 Yeah. I find it really fascinating that he said, yeah, it's about the oil. But they've got access to the oil and they're not taking it up. So it isn't, we know it isn't about, if he says it's about the oil, it's not about the oil, right? So what is it about? Is it about the fact that everything's going to melt? In which case it's going to be a, you know, a better place to be.
4:32 Speaker 04 There's a, there's a good theory.
4:33 Speaker 03 What's that?
4:34 Speaker 04 That it's about the Mercator projection.
4:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:37 Speaker 04 The problem is, based on, so the Mercator, if you look at a flat map of the globe, the things that are further from the equator look bigger. So there's no doubt Greenland is extremely big.
4:46 Speaker 03 That's funny.
4:47 Speaker 04 It's extremely big Greenland. It's the biggest island in the world if you're not counting Australia.
4:50 Speaker 03 No, well, that's not, that's not, yeah, that's a continent. That's the tiniest continent.
4:55 Speaker 04 So it's the biggest, so Greenland's the biggest island in the world.
4:57 Speaker 03 It's the biggest island.
4:57 Speaker 04 Without caveats. But basically, the problem is it looks 12 times bigger than it is. Like, it really looks, yeah, yeah. And it's all because the Mercator projection is a very good way of making a 3D object flat, you know, rendering it in a flat form. And it's thanks to a Flemish cartographer called Gerardus Mercator from several centuries ago. It looks as big as Africa on a flat map. It's really not, you know? It is big, but it's nowhere near as big as it looks. I mean, it looks almost as big as North America. So what we need to do is change the map immediately to make things look a bit more accurate.
5:31 Speaker 02 It's bigger than Mexico, so it is big.
5:34 Speaker 04 It's big.
5:34 Speaker 02 And it means that Denmark is the biggest country that's wholly in Europe. So that's always a fun quiz question. It's like, what's, apart from Russia, which is partly in Asia, what's the biggest country in Europe? And it's Denmark, even though it looks small because it has this huge territory.
5:50 Speaker 04 That's great. Very good.
5:51 Speaker 01 That's very interesting.
5:52 Speaker 03 But hasn't it, it has belonged to America before, or?
5:55 Speaker 02 Greenland? No. I thought it was Eric the Red and then.
5:59 Speaker 03 Well, he was Icelandic. So he was expelled from Iceland for manslaughter. And the idea is that he called it Greenland to lure people there. Because he thought that if he called it Greenland, people would want to go.
6:10 Speaker 04 Mordurisuko, isn't it great that there still exists on the map of the world, a joke, a prank? Isn't that great?
6:17 Speaker 03 Yeah. Oh, that's really, that's really, really interesting.
6:19 Speaker 04 James, have you been there?
6:21 Speaker 02 No, I haven't. I'd love to go one day. I've been to Iceland a few times, but yeah, it's, it's just tricky to get to from here, isn't it? Because you have to go to Denmark and then go back over.
6:30 Speaker 04 Yes, right.
6:31 Speaker 03 I'd love to go. They, they, it claimed on the internet that Inuit traditions coming back, one is tattooing your face when you get your first period.
6:40 Speaker 04 Okay.
6:42 Speaker 01 A specific kind of tattoo?
6:44 Speaker 03 A specific, yeah, like dots between the eyes, that kind of thing. And childbirth, every child you have, and those traditions are coming back.
6:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:50 Speaker 03 And what was the other, really? Oh, yeah, washing your hair with urine.
6:54 Speaker 01 Right.
6:54 Speaker 03 And I obviously was attracted by that fact.
6:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:57 Speaker 03 I went after that and I found that James Cracknell's wife, Beverly, has been online.
7:04 Speaker 01 The roa?
7:05 Speaker 03 Beverly Turner.
7:06 Speaker 01 Beverly Turner.
7:08 Speaker 03 Been online going, yeah, I'm doing that. That's great. I'm about to get into the shower and wash my hair with a cupful of pee.
7:12 Speaker 01 Oh.
7:13 Speaker 03 And lots of people swear by it.
7:15 Speaker 02 Is that true?
7:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, and so much so that the Icelandic, Icelandic company, no, not company, students, Icelandic students have made a hard, a bar shampoo out of cow urine.
7:28 Speaker 02 Wow. Um. Because it has ammonia, right? So it could bleach.
7:31 Speaker 03 Ammonia.
7:32 Speaker 02 For sure. It could bleach your hair.
7:33 Speaker 01 Uh. That was gonna be my question, though. Um, is she doing it with animal or family?
7:38 Speaker 03 Her own urine.
7:39 Speaker 01 Right, yeah.
7:39 Speaker 03 And so there's quite a lot of people out there doing it. And I came across the word urine monger, which I was so thrilled to know existed, from Peep's diary, where obviously urine was a commodity.
7:52 Speaker 02 Oh, right.
7:53 Speaker 03 Because it was used for tanning, animal hides, but also for bleaching. You know all of this.
7:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, of course it was, of course, yeah.
7:58 Speaker 03 It's used for bleaching clothes. And they used to put a big bucket outside the textile manufacturer's house for people to piss in on the way back from the pub.
8:06 Speaker 02 Gosh.
8:06 Speaker 03 Because it was a fixative for dye.
8:08 Speaker 02 Hmm.
8:08 Speaker 03 So if you're making very fancy clothes for queens and stuff, you would only use newborn baby piss.
8:14 Speaker 01 Oh, come on. That makes sense.
8:16 Speaker 03 This is what the internet says. Just prove me wrong, guys.
8:20 Speaker 01 I think we have the same sources. Um, because we did a fact ages ago, I remember, about how, um, the urine of redheads would be used in stained glass window because it had magical properties and it would just last longer.
8:31 Speaker 03 Oh, really?
8:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
8:32 Speaker 02 When you say we did a fact.
8:35 Speaker 04 But newborn babies produce very little.
8:37 Speaker 03 I know. Well, I imagine that made it all more expensive, didn't it?
8:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Supply and demand.
8:43 Speaker 03 Supply and demand.
8:44 Speaker 02 That was quite a rabbit hole, Sally, I have to say.
8:47 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:47 Speaker 01 There's a thing that they're exporting from Greenland to Dubai. Yeah, which is ice for their ice cubes, for their cocktails. So there's a startup company in Greenland that say that they have the purest of ice that you can possibly get. Black ice, they call it. It's where you go.
9:08 Speaker 02 That just sounds like it's got grit in it.
9:11 Speaker 02 The purest ice possible, black ice.
9:13 Speaker 01 I know, it's a Greenland situation again. It's a prank. It melts slower, apparently, as part of the marketing, I read. And they say it's quite environmentally friendly, is their pitch.
9:26 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, it doesn't sound like it.
9:28 Speaker 04 Not many people have the pitch. This is clearly the worst thing we could be doing. We're going to sail our diesel boat out to a iceberg and crack it.
9:35 Speaker 01 Greenland has to import a lot of stuff by boat, by diesel boat, right? So you're sending in full boats, but you're leaving with nothing. So they're saying, at least you're leaving with ice. And so we're making money off of that. So they're saying at least these boats are making the return journey full.
9:49 Speaker 03 But the ice thing, they have that in Sweden as well. I mean, at the ice bar in Stockholm, they have a whole thing about where the ice has come from and, you know, ice mining.
9:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, I've had the water from icebergs in Iceland, in fact. Like, they sold it in the airport.
10:04 Speaker 04 Well, you only feed your cat melted iceberg water, don't you?
10:08 Speaker 01 It's environmentally friendly, though, so that's good.
10:12 Speaker 02 You leave my cat out of this.
10:14 Speaker 03 We've had icicles from our blocked gutters this week.
10:18 Speaker 04 I see who you've been selling them to.
10:20 Speaker 03 Exactly.
10:21 Speaker 04 Beverly Turner.
10:23 Speaker 03 Gutter water.
10:23 Speaker 04 Sally Phillips's gutter ice, I think, is something you could sell.
10:28 Speaker 02 Because, like, the delivered roof drivers go into your house with a pizza, you might as well leave with something, right?
10:34 Speaker 03 Exactly.
10:35 Speaker 01 So Greenland has a great history of explorers. There's a guy who I obsess with, who was called Peter Freukin. And he did a lot of early exploration with the Inuit. He was Icelandic and so he would go over there and he lived there and he married someone from there, had two kids there. And he's quite notable because of a story that he wrote about in his book where he was caught in a storm. There was a bit of an avalanche of where he was sleeping and he had to get out of the burrow he was in using-
11:05 Speaker 02 Oh, no.
11:06 Speaker 01 Poo knife, right?
11:07 Speaker 03 Poo knife?
11:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, now, this has been debunked that it's possible that-
11:12 Speaker 03 Why is it poo and you have to tell me?
11:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, the idea-
11:14 Speaker 02 It's exactly what it sounds like, Sally, I'm afraid to say.
11:17 Speaker 03 But why do you need a knife for poo?
11:18 Speaker 01 So he's stuck inside-
11:19 Speaker 02 Oh, it's not exactly what it sounds like then.
11:24 Speaker 04 It's like a fish knife, yeah, yeah. Slightly different shape to better serve it.
11:28 Speaker 02 It's so embarrassing when you accidentally use a poo knife to eat your melon.
11:33 Speaker 03 So to get poo out of animals?
11:34 Speaker 01 No, so he's stuck underneath the snow. It's really hard packed, he couldn't get out. So he had this idea, what if I poo? And then what if I let it freeze? And then what if I then use it as a knife, as a tool, as an instrument to get out of here? And so that's the story that he wrote down in his book. And it's been questioned by certain members of this podcast and the general scientific community. And they've shown in recreations that you couldn't possibly do that. However, I looked into his story-
12:05 Speaker 03 I love that it was a recreation.
12:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:06 Speaker 03 I want to make a movie of the recreation.
12:10 Speaker 04 It's like 127 Hours, it's really exciting.
12:13 Speaker 01 Well, that's the thing. When you read the whole story, you realise this surely can't be a lie. Surely this man did it because he was in this hole. He was sleeping that night while the storm was raging on the head of a bear that he had killed a few days earlier.
12:28 Speaker 02 This can't be untrue.
12:28 Speaker 01 Can't be untrue, right? And then as he was trying to get out, after having made his poo knife, his beard got wet from all of the exertion he was giving. It got really sweaty and it went on the rails of his sled and got stuck to it. So he had to rip the beard off his face in order to get out as well. So this is a guy using a-
12:48 Speaker 04 Why didn't he poo a razor?
12:54 Speaker 03 It's an early 3D printer.
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14:04 Speaker 01 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.
14:07 Speaker 02 Okay, my fact this week is that Merriam-Webster has a collection of cards of all words in the English language spelled backwards.
14:17 Speaker 01 It's fantastic.
14:18 Speaker 02 Oh, wow. Interesting. Well, that's the question, isn't it? Why would you need it?
14:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:26 Speaker 02 You guys have researched it, right?
14:27 Speaker 04 You had a theory, Dan, when James first told us this headline fact, and I liked it so much.
14:31 Speaker 01 Oh. Was it for ambulances?
14:35 Speaker 04 It's for ambulances. They've got it backwards, and so, yeah. And we never really fleshed out the theory enough to clarify exactly how it was useful to know.
14:48 Speaker 02 No, so this is, according to Merriam-Webster, they have these things, and what it is, is if someone sends you a query about how many words are that they're ending phobia? Or what are the only three words in English that end G R Y?
15:05 Speaker 01 Yes.
15:05 Speaker 02 So people would send these questions to them. So there's quite a famous sort of puzzle, which is there are three words in the English language ending in G R Y.
15:15 Speaker 01 Okay.
15:15 Speaker 02 Hungry and angry are two of them.
15:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, you got my two.
15:19 Speaker 02 What is the third word?
15:20 Speaker 01 Hangry.
15:21 Speaker 02 Hungry was not in the English language. It might be soon. In actual fact, it's a trick. So it begins, there are three words in the English language. And the trick is that the answer is, the third word is language in the English.
15:36 Speaker 01 Oh, yes.
15:37 Speaker 02 So that was, when you're kids, that's the kind of trick they do, right? In actual fact, there are other words.
15:43 Speaker 03 Language doesn't end G R Y. I've got very confused.
15:46 Speaker 02 I know, I know. It's like a school child's
15:49 Speaker 05 Language, great.
15:50 Speaker 02 Riddle, but there is a word, unhungry, used by Shakespeare, which I guess means not hungry. It's in Coriolanus. He, O E D also has magery, puggery and iggery.
16:03 Speaker 01 Hmm, okay.
16:05 Speaker 02 Not that common.
16:05 Speaker 03 What do any of those mean?
16:07 Speaker 02 Magery means in spite of, puggery is a type of Indian scarf and iggery is an Egyptian word meaning hurry up.
16:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, magery, that's French, isn't it? Meaning in spite of.
16:17 Speaker 01 Is that so?
16:18 Speaker 03 I don't know, fake echoes of school.
16:21 Speaker 02 Feels like it comes from there. So they would get these questions every single week and they would need to be able to answer them. And so they came up with these 315,000 slips of paper with backward words. And they're in 129 boxes and they're still there in the basement of Merriam-Webster.
16:39 Speaker 01 Do you know what I quite like? There would be a few words that you'd go, ah, they got that wrong. Like wolf, for example, which is actually flow backwards, right?
16:49 Speaker 02 Oh, I see. So this is in the wrong box.
16:53 Speaker 01 Exactly. So these are called anodromes. And it's, an anodrome is where the word is another word backwards. And we've got over 900 of those supposedly in the English language. So you would constantly come across.
17:04 Speaker 02 Like Dan is nad.
17:06 Speaker 01 Yes.
17:06 Speaker 02 Evil and.
17:07 Speaker 01 Liv is another example, yes.
17:10 Speaker 02 Merriam-Webster, by the way, is the, it's basically the American dictionary, isn't it?
17:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:15 Speaker 02 Yes, it's the biggie. I don't know. Cause like, obviously I'm an O E D guy. Yeah. Well, I emailed Susie Dent and asked her if we have the same thing at the O E D. And she checked with her colleagues and said that they don't have it. She said it was a nice idea, but these days, because we have digital. Dictionaries and now AI can find all these things in a few seconds. They're probably not going to start it now.
17:37 Speaker 04 Shame, because it's good for rhyming as well, rhyming dictionaries.
17:39 Speaker 03 I look at them all the time online. Yeah, I do. A lot. When I'm writing. Yeah, I do.
17:44 Speaker 01 Merriam-Webster, by the way, so founded by Webster Brothers, but Noah Webster being the biggest character of that group and the one who really did most of the work on it. Fascinating life, like he was a huge impact in America. He's sort of silently a founding father that doesn't really get mentioned much. For example, Alexander Hamilton and he worked closely on the Federalist Paper. And he was in New York City because of Hamilton, but he doesn't appear, as far as I can tell, in that story, or maybe he does.
18:11 Speaker 02 But he would have been useful for all the rhymes and the rap.
18:14 Speaker 01 That's what I thought. Like this guy's, this guy probably taught this guy to rap.
18:20 Speaker 02 But these cards were the work of another guy called Philip Babcock Gove, who worked on the third Webster's dictionary. And he was quite controversial because he wanted to put slang in the dictionary. And until then, you didn't really have slang in dictionaries. And he basically listed almost all the populous swear words apart from the really, really strongest ones.
18:43 Speaker 04 It was controversial and that's the whole point about dictionaries is, you know, they're describing the way language is used.
18:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:49 Speaker 04 Rather than what you want to be in the dictionary, what's appropriate.
18:54 Speaker 03 Are there more prescriptive or descriptive dictionaries?
18:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, these days they're descriptive. That's the point.
19:01 Speaker 03 Prescriptive.
19:01 Speaker 04 Exactly. Yeah. And I was reading about the life of a lexicographer and what it's like. You know how senior you are as a lexicographer, depending on what words you're working on? So.
19:12 Speaker 03 Wow.
19:13 Speaker 04 As you get more senior and more practiced.
19:15 Speaker 03 Get longer words or shorter words?
19:17 Speaker 04 Shorter words.
19:17 Speaker 02 Really?
19:18 Speaker 04 The really hard ones to do are small words which can have many meanings.
19:22 Speaker 02 It's easy to know what a xylophone is.
19:24 Speaker 04 Right.
19:25 Speaker 02 But what does?
19:25 Speaker 03 As mean?
19:27 Speaker 02 Precisely.
19:28 Speaker 04 So there's, there's a lexicographer called Corey Stamper.
19:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, oh.
19:32 Speaker 04 You know what? Yes.
19:34 Speaker 02 We can go shorter.
19:36 Speaker 04 There's someone. There's a lexicographer called Emily Brewster, who found a new meaning for the word "ah", and that was a big deal.
19:45 Speaker 02 Do you know what it was?
19:46 Speaker 04 I do. So it's when you're using "a" to mean a function word before a proper noun to show that a condition is new or unusual. I'm going to explain what I mean. So after the recording was over, "a furious Schreiber challenged Harkin", right? Now, what that would be is to show that Dan is not normally furious. "A furious Schreiber", it's using it in that sense to show that that condition is new or unusual.
20:11 Speaker 02 Right.
20:12 Speaker 04 So that is a new sense of the word "a".
20:14 Speaker 02 Wow.
20:14 Speaker 04 I know, and that's a-
20:15 Speaker 03 Well, it's not a new sense. It's a new writing down of a sense.
20:19 Speaker 02 Well, it's a new meaning?
20:20 Speaker 03 No, because that's always been used, right?
20:22 Speaker 04 Take it up with Emily Brewster.
20:23 Speaker 03 That's always been used. She's just classified it. She's classified it for the first time.
20:28 Speaker 04 But "run", in 2013, an OED lexicographer did the word "run", and it took him nine months. It's just-
20:37 Speaker 02 How long did it take him to do "walk"?
20:42 Speaker 01 Well, that's, um, yeah. The word "God", for example, Merriam-Webster had to revise that for a different, an unabridged version of their dictionary. And the person, I think it was Corey Stamper was her name. Um, she spent four months talking to everyone about what that word could possibly mean. She also did the word "take", which took her a month. And she said, "It's so annoying because no one's ever going to really read it." So it's just there. It's the-
21:06 Speaker 02 That's true, because when you look in a dictionary, you want to look up a word in the dictionary. Usually, it's a word you've never heard of. You don't really want to know all the different meanings of the word "ah", do you?
21:15 Speaker 03 I have heard people, writers, reading dictionaries every day. Have you?
21:19 Speaker 02 Well, I've read the OED. Yeah, we used to do it for QI all the time. Like, when there's a new letter came up on QI, it would be someone's job, often Andy, actually. You would go through them, the first to the last, write down all the unusual ones.
21:32 Speaker 03 That's quite a claim, isn't it? "I've read the dictionary. It's like I've read the Bible."
21:35 Speaker 04 It's quite fun to read the shorter letters. You know, like your J's and your K's, they're a bit shorter in the dictionary. And you know, you know, how tricky a series of QI was going to be by how short it was. Because, you know, there's almost nothing that begins with J. It's quite a, because it's a late letter to join the alphabet. So you think, "Oh, gonna have a rough time here." Get to O, easy, easy.
21:54 Speaker 02 Well, you're one of those people currently working on X, I can tell you.
21:58 Speaker 04 Dan and I got out in time not to do X.
22:02 Speaker 04 One thing dictionaries do a lot of these days is posting a word online. And, you know, and this is a thing that Susie Dent does a bit of as well, is sort of posting a word.
22:09 Speaker 02 Like, Susie will do a word that's to do with what's happening in the news or.
22:13 Speaker 04 Like, wobble gudgeon is a useless bastard who's the president, or it's some like, it's some subtle reference like that.
22:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:19 Speaker 04 And it's, but this is basically, I think Samuel Johnson is the first to do it.
22:23 Speaker 02 Really?
22:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, because there are a few jokes in Johnson's dictionary, and Johnson didn't write the first dictionary by quite a long stretch, but he would put in jokes like, oats, a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
22:37 Speaker 02 And I think he had, like, lexicographer, a harmless drudge or something like that, didn't he?
22:41 Speaker 04 Exactly, yeah, yeah. But it was basically him having little jokes all the way through his dictionary.
22:46 Speaker 01 Well, Noah Webster did that. So the word cat was defined as the domestic cat needs no description. It is a deceitful animal and when enraged, extremely spiteful.
22:56 Speaker 02 Wow.
22:56 Speaker 01 Was that a joke or was that a pissed off? He was, he was quite a curmudgeonly character, so it might, that might be genuine anger. It's weird that they would just slip that in. They would break all the rules, their own rules that they were setting for this extraordinary tome.
23:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
23:10 Speaker 01 To just release a bit of anger.
23:11 Speaker 02 Takes a long time to write dictionaries.
23:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:14 Speaker 02 The OED was published in 1928 and it was incepted, well, they came up with the idea 70 years earlier. So it took 70 years, but the Brothers Grimm, they started the German dictionary in 1838 and it wasn't fully finished until 1961.
23:32 Speaker 01 Didn't know that they wrote the dictionary.
23:34 Speaker 02 They were linguists.
23:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:36 Speaker 02 Before, well, they were, like, they didn't really write fairy tales, they just collected them from places.
23:41 Speaker 01 Yes.
23:42 Speaker 02 And the Swedish Academy Dictionary, that began in 1786 and the final word was put in in 2023.
23:54 Speaker 04 Congratulations guys, very cool.
23:55 Speaker 03 How many words are there in the English language then? Because I thought.
23:58 Speaker 01 Well, there's 315,000 cards that are in the backward library.
24:02 Speaker 03 315,000.
24:03 Speaker 02 It kind of depends how you count it. I mean, I know it's a cup out answer, but.
24:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, but I, the nouns verbs adverbs, yeah. Interesting.
24:11 Speaker 04 Can I tell you one more thing about the OED?
24:13 Speaker 03 No, we've had enough.
24:14 Speaker 04 All right.
24:15 Speaker 01 Time for fact number three.
24:17 Speaker 03 No, tell us what.
24:18 Speaker 04 Just that the OED has a vault of not yet words.
24:21 Speaker 03 Wow.
24:22 Speaker 02 Does it?
24:23 Speaker 04 And these are words that have been, I don't think it's actually kept in a, like a basement. It's basically where they keep words that have been pitched, but not quite been accepted yet.
24:33 Speaker 03 Okay.
24:34 Speaker 04 And some of these words, I think, are arguable. You can argue the topic.
24:36 Speaker 03 Like riz.
24:37 Speaker 04 Riz is a perfect example. Is that in wide enough usage yet to qualify as a pinned down entry?
24:43 Speaker 02 What does riz mean?
24:44 Speaker 04 Ah, if you don't know, yeah, charisma.
24:46 Speaker 02 Charisma.
24:46 Speaker 04 It's flirting, basically, you know, it's sort of, someone's, someone's got riz.
24:52 Speaker 04 But it entries 15 years ago in the, in the OED vault. Dringle, which was the watermark left on wood by a glass of liquid, which is useful, but I've never heard anyone use dringle.
25:03 Speaker 03 No.
25:04 Speaker 04 Fergle, to feel in a pocket for a small object, just fergling.
25:08 Speaker 03 That just sounds like sex practice to me.
25:12 Speaker 04 What were they doing, your honour?
25:13 Speaker 01 Fergling out in the park.
25:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, what's his face from EastEnders in Elleby?
25:25 Speaker 01 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that if you ever saw a passenger on British Airways, sitting with a vodka tonic and wearing sunglasses, they were most likely dead. This is a piece that came out anecdotally from air attendants who were reporting what you'd do if someone dies while a plane is mid-flight. A lot of the things would be to just cover them up in their seat, move them to a seat in first class. Or in this case, as reported by British Airways, you would put some sunglasses on them, pop a drink down in front of them.
26:00 Speaker 03 And also a copy of the Daily Mail, I heard in the article you said.
26:04 Speaker 01 Really?
26:05 Speaker 03 Yeah, because nothing makes you not want to talk to someone. I'm sitting there with a copy of the Daily Mail.
26:11 Speaker 01 And nothing sacks your will to live like reading it. So that's, it's kind of perfect. Yeah.
26:14 Speaker 02 I wonder if they count that in their circulation figures.
26:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:17 Speaker 02 Because isn't that the thing with newspapers is that they bulk out their circulation figures by giving a load of them to airlines? And say, oh, you know, thousands of people read them, but actually they're just giving away for free.
26:27 Speaker 04 Half of them are dead.
26:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:30 Speaker 03 Define read.
26:31 Speaker 04 It's a bit, it's a bit classless of them to call it circulation, given how tasteless that is. But yeah, but this is, I think this is completely reasonable because the alternative is to have people carrying bodies through the cabin. Mid-flight, like I don't think that's very.
26:45 Speaker 03 But the article you sent, it said, we don't do that anymore.
26:49 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly.
26:50 Speaker 03 We don't do that anymore. Yeah. And what really made me laugh in that article is that the trainer was saying to the students, you cannot put a dead passenger in the toilet. It's not respectful and it's not strapped in for landing. And there was, there were cases of bodies getting rigor mortis and they then couldn't get them out of the toilet.
27:08 Speaker 01 Yes. Okay. Just psychologically though, Andy, if you're sat on a plane next to someone who's just died, the last thing I want is them coming over and popping some sunglasses.
27:19 Speaker 02 Getting free vodka tonic.
27:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:20 Speaker 02 It's outrageous.
27:21 Speaker 01 Spend the whole trip going, are you, sorry, are you reading that? Can I?
27:25 Speaker 02 I think, I think it's okay. I mean.
27:27 Speaker 01 Do you? You'd be, you would happily just continue your own flight, sitting next to a dead person.
27:32 Speaker 02 What is my alternative?
27:33 Speaker 01 Move seats or get them.
27:34 Speaker 03 Or they move seats or they go in the stewardess, sleeping area.
27:37 Speaker 04 This is the bumping up to first class thing. I mean, the trick, the thing you really want to do is you want to die for five minutes, get moved up to first class, recover. And then.
27:45 Speaker 01 Yes.
27:46 Speaker 04 What are they going to do? Move you back? You know?
27:48 Speaker 03 They're fuckers in first class. So you try, I mean, I, not first class, but I remember being in business class with a baby. And the looks you get with a baby, imagine, and they wouldn't accept a dead person.
27:57 Speaker 02 There is some airlines are trying to ban babies in first class now. I read this in the news this week. Yeah.
28:03 Speaker 01 Right.
28:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:04 Speaker 01 All your petition was read, wasn't it?
28:07 Speaker 02 For instance, like if you fly EasyJet or Ryanair, which is what I would mostly fly, there is no first class, there's no business class and all the seats are booked up.
28:16 Speaker 01 Yes.
28:16 Speaker 02 So where do you put them?
28:17 Speaker 01 That's true. Well, Singapore Airlines supposedly had a corpse cupboard that you would put them into.
28:22 Speaker 02 It must have been used for other things occasionally.
28:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, people's suits that need had hanging up.
28:27 Speaker 04 Again, I think it's completely reasonable. Supposedly Virgin will clear four seats in economy and lie the person down over there. But this is a thing that of course happens because if you've ever been on a long haul flight, you've probably been sharing it with someone who's died and is being repatriated. It's just a, just a thing you have to do.
28:45 Speaker 01 But they'll be underneath.
28:46 Speaker 04 They'll be in the hold. I don't know about the hold, but they won't be in the cabin with the rest of the passengers, obviously. But there was a case only a few weeks ago, there was an 89 year old passenger. She with her family, you know, her younger family boarded an easy jet flight at Malaga, but she boarded while dead. And basically the family had brought her along, put her in the seat and then said, oh no, she's died on board.
29:08 Speaker 02 I think there's still controversy about whether she, like they're still saying that she died on.
29:13 Speaker 04 Yes, they were still saying she was just tired, but I think a lot of people noticed.
29:16 Speaker 01 Why did they do it?
29:18 Speaker 04 The, the theory is that it was.
29:20 Speaker 03 It's very expensive.
29:20 Speaker 04 It's very expensive to repatriate.
29:22 Speaker 01 Yes, okay.
29:22 Speaker 02 If you repatriate someone, it'll cost between 2,000 and 4,000 pounds, which is like somewhere between business and first class, isn't it? It's quite expensive.
29:32 Speaker 03 I'm quite fascinated by the flight simulator community.
29:35 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
29:35 Speaker 03 Do you know what? There's like, I mean, it's 90% male.
29:38 Speaker 04 Yes, I did perk up a bit too early there, didn't I?
29:42 Speaker 03 Sort of six, you can get your own cockpit in your lounge. There is almost exact, I mean, it's almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
29:50 Speaker 02 Wow.
29:52 Speaker 03 But anyway, through that I found there was, this is, this was a real pilot. His first job from flight simulating was to then flying real planes, flying dead bodies across America to where they were going to be buried. And his first flight, nobody told him that cadavers grown at altitude.
30:11 Speaker 04 Do they?
30:12 Speaker 02 Oh, no.
30:12 Speaker 03 Apparently so, yeah.
30:13 Speaker 02 Pressure change, like the air would.
30:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:16 Speaker 02 Lord.
30:16 Speaker 03 Cadavers had, have air in their lungs when you go higher and that, that air comes out, which means they grow.
30:22 Speaker 02 That's astonishing.
30:23 Speaker 03 Totally terrifying.
30:27 Speaker 02 But to be honest, I make that noise when I'm reading the Daily Mail anyway, so.
30:34 Speaker 04 Has there, has there ever been, I really hope there has been a case of someone who's just been flying, who is an enthusiast, who has their own flight simulator and they've had to do the announcement. Is there someone on board who can fly a plane?
30:44 Speaker 03 That's probably everyone's fantasy, fantasy situation. I don't know, I did go looking for it, I couldn't find one. I found that about 27% of the flight simulation community have or have had a pilot's licence at some point.
31:00 Speaker 04 Okay.
31:01 Speaker 03 There's quite a significant amount.
31:02 Speaker 04 Seventy-three percent.
31:04 Speaker 03 Who don't. But there's also a gay and lesbian and trans quite active flight sim community.
31:11 Speaker 04 Okay.
31:12 Speaker 03 Simming. And they talk about really enjoying sightseeing and they'll go and all fly together, like across the Masai Mara and things like that. And because there's great, great.
31:22 Speaker 04 Because you're all doing the same simulation at the same time.
31:24 Speaker 03 At the same time. And when you're on the simulation, you can see the actual. See the actual animals, because there's drones and things like that.
31:29 Speaker 04 I mean, I used to play a bit of Flight Simulator.
31:31 Speaker 03 You'd surprise me not at all.
31:39 Speaker 04 Your dad Sally?
31:40 Speaker 03 My dad worked for British Airways.
31:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's quite cool. So you had a, you must have had a childhood.
31:44 Speaker 03 Well, it was glamorous then. It was glamorous.
31:46 Speaker 04 When are we talking?
31:46 Speaker 03 Well, he started working for them in the 60s.
31:49 Speaker 04 Cool.
31:51 Speaker 03 I've not really engaged with that. I just have been very selfish and I asked my father that much about his job. But I did this morning, because it was, I said, can you tell me any stories about people dying? And he said, no, I can't. I said, what kind of stories have you got? And he has lots of stories about, you know, heroic stewardesses. So I grew, I wanted to be a stewardess because they struck me as fantastically glamorous. There was a story, I remember being told, I don't know if it's true or not, about Starbom, a stewardess who rescued a flight because the plane took off, I can't remember where from, and the toilets have a cap on. For the, anyway, this cap was not on the toilet. So when the plane took off,
32:32 Speaker 03 um, she went to the toilet, um, before the lights went on for the passengers to be able to use it.
32:38 Speaker 04 Perks of the job.
32:39 Speaker 03 And perks of the job.
32:40 Speaker 04 Yep.
32:40 Speaker 03 And it sucked her in. And so she was then keeping the pressure. But that blue stuff, the blue bleach is very, very acid and corrosive. And so it tattooed a star shape on her. And obviously they landed quite quickly afterwards, but she's safe. It's like the little boy with the thumb in the dug.
32:59 Speaker 04 Wow.
33:00 Speaker 03 Yes, stewardess with the bottom in the toilet. Saved the plane from catastrophe.
33:03 Speaker 02 What a story for that tattoo. It's so often people are like, why do you have that tattoo?
33:07 Speaker 04 I was just drunk in Cambodia. Yeah, yeah, but this is like, wow.
33:10 Speaker 03 We have all these sort of stewardess heroin stories, like Muhammad Ali on a plane, uh, stewardess coming up saying, Mr. Ali, you need to, um, use your seatbelt. And him saying, Superman don't need no seatbelt. And her saying, Superman don't need no plane, Mr. Ali.
33:26 Speaker 03 It's very good.
33:26 Speaker 04 Lovely.
33:27 Speaker 01 God, you know, I'm quite scared of flying and I thought I was getting over it and you've now added a new fear. The idea of if that seatbelt sign goes on, that I'm going to get my ass sucked down through the toilet.
33:38 Speaker 04 Can I give you another one, Dan?
33:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:39 Speaker 04 This is my favorite BA flight ever.
33:41 Speaker 01 Okay.
33:42 Speaker 04 And this has recently, in fact, been featured on QI. Uh, so this is very exciting. This was the flight in 1982.
33:46 Speaker 03 I thought you weren't allowed to reuse facts.
33:47 Speaker 04 Uh, well, I'm going to. Watch me.
33:49 Speaker 02 Wow.
33:51 Speaker 04 If I had a nickel for every time I'd heard about the poo knife, all right?
33:57 Speaker 04 One of the most exciting BA flights ever is the one where they flew into an ash cloud by mistake. They're flying over Indonesia.
34:02 Speaker 03 Oh.
34:03 Speaker 04 Uh, and the, the plane's sensors were fit to look for moisture in the air. If you're flying into a big storm, the plane's sensors are looking for moisture. The ash from this volcanic eruption was dry.
34:13 Speaker 01 Right.
34:14 Speaker 04 So all the ash landed inside the engine, melted, then solidified inside. So that all four engines stopped working. And the captain, Eric Moody, 41 years old at the time, made the famous, now quite famous announcement. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress. Incredible, right? Do you know one of the reasons that flights was all right and everyone on board survived?
34:43 Speaker 02 Why?
34:43 Speaker 04 He had recently been on the simulator. And done a simulation of a four-engine failure.
34:49 Speaker 01 Wow.
34:51 Speaker 04 They, they, they had to restart the engines. What they had to do, they had to wait for the engines to cool down enough for the ash to break off and then they could restart them.
34:58 Speaker 03 Wow.
34:59 Speaker 04 But it took a long time and they were on, they were trying to glide to the ground. Uh, and he had to do it, the ash had smashed up the windscreen and made it impossible to see through. So he had to land by being told the readings on the instruments and how close you are to the ground. Very cautious. Anyway, he very sadly died in 2024, but just before that, he was on QI. And you can, if you look up the clip of QI, it's from, I can't remember what letter it is, S L T, U, there we go. Uh, and he was on there for understatement for his lovely announcement. And it's a really cool moment on the show. That's incredible.
35:29 Speaker 03 Wow, that is cool. I bet you, I bet they've got, they've got the visuals for that on, on Microsoft Flight.
35:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
35:34 Speaker 03 I bet they do. I bet they do now. People will be desperate for that.
35:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely.
35:38 Speaker 03 Cause they do ice on your wind screens when you fly.
35:41 Speaker 04 Oh, really? On Flight Simulator?
35:42 Speaker 03 Yeah.
35:43 Speaker 04 Lovely.
35:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, depending on the temperature.
35:44 Speaker 04 They've upgraded it since that last flight. So exciting.
35:46 Speaker 03 You need to get back on.
35:47 Speaker 04 I can't wait.
35:48 Speaker 03 It's a mere six grand to update your cockpit.
35:51 Speaker 04 I'm gonna have to change my lounge as well. Oh. Do you, do you guys remember that documentary about the Fire Festival that went horribly wrong? One of the characters that just adds to the chaos of it all is a pilot who takes all of them around in a flight and he'd never flown before. Purely on Flight Simulator was his thing. Do you listen to Black Box Down?
36:10 Speaker 03 No. What's that?
36:12 Speaker 04 It's a podcast about plane crashes. It's ended now sadly, but every episode they did a different flight incident and.
36:18 Speaker 03 Well, what happened to it? How did it die?
36:19 Speaker 04 Uh, both, both hosts fell asleep very sadly.
36:24 Speaker 02 My wife is a pilot, a helicopter pilot.
36:26 Speaker 03 No.
36:27 Speaker 02 And she's obsessed with plane crashes. And I think that is, if you are a pilot, you do want to read about all the crashes, cause it kind of helps you know about what might happen in the future.
36:38 Speaker 04 You wanna read about, cause there always is something so tiny that you might not have noticed. So you just, yeah, you wanna get those little moments. And the things that can go wrong are so strange and different because, but the point of that is that flying is incredibly safe. And the point about it is that. What we're trying to say here is it's safe. But that's, that is true though. Every time something goes wrong, the, the airline and aviation industry is unbelievably good at absorbing the mistakes, learning from them and implementing them for next time.
37:03 Speaker 02 There tries to be not so much like, I'm not gonna tell anyone what, what happened cause I'll get in trouble kind of thing. They have a community of like, we will try and be as open as possible to stop it from happening again.
37:13 Speaker 01 Could I tell you something culturally that British Airways gave us?
37:16 Speaker 04 Sure.
37:17 Speaker 01 It is thanks to British Airways that, basically, that we have the Beastie Boys. Beastie Boys, who you'll know, No Sleep Till Brooklyn, Fight For Your Right To Party, InterGalactic, Mighty, Ad Rock, MCA. Yeah, so basically, they were struggling young hip hop artists in New York and they put out an EP and they had a song on it called Cookie Puss. And BA used it on an advert without having asked for permission. So Beastie Boys sued BA, they got $40,000 for it, and that's what funded an apartment for them to live in in New York and then start recording their main stuff. So they attribute that moment of BA doing that to their whole career.
37:55 Speaker 04 And what's it about, a cat called Cookie?
37:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, must be, surely.
37:59 Speaker 04 I don't know.
38:05 Speaker 05 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At The Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.
38:19 Speaker 02 People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
38:30 Speaker 05 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
38:35 Speaker 06 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
38:41 Speaker 05 So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.
39:03 Speaker 01 Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.
39:08 Speaker 04 My fact is, Australians like you more if you use Australian slang, but only if you do so in an Australian accent.
39:17 Speaker 02 We have a lot of Australian listeners, so
39:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, we do.
39:20 Speaker 02 We do the next 15 minutes in an Aussie accent.
39:22 Speaker 03 How's your Aussie accent?
39:24 Speaker 04 Terrible. It's always, it's always been horrific. Yeah. Well, so we should say you, you grew up in Sydney for a bit.
39:30 Speaker 03 Well, yeah, I was just a couple of years.
39:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, I was too, but you had an Aussie accent.
39:34 Speaker 03 I had an Aussie accent. I was desperate to fit in, but I wasn't aware of it. I had an Aussie accent then I couldn't ditch it.
39:41 Speaker 04 So what did you have before you had, because you were born in Hong Kong?
39:44 Speaker 03 I spoke like presented from the World Service circa 1950.
39:48 Speaker 04 Okay.
39:49 Speaker 03 Until I went to Australia and then started speaking like an Australian and then couldn't get rid of it for ages. And then when I started acting, it was the one accent I couldn't do for a very, very long time.
39:58 Speaker 04 Oh, really?
39:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, because I couldn't hear it.
40:00 Speaker 04 That's interesting.
40:01 Speaker 03 But did you see the story that it was the most attractive accent to Americans?
40:06 Speaker 04 I can believe it.
40:07 Speaker 03 Sexiest?
40:08 Speaker 04 Yeah.
40:09 Speaker 03 Smartest, most appealing. But I guess it's the least threatening accent, isn't it? Because everything goes up at the end.
40:14 Speaker 04 Yes. And if you're, if you're throwing in sexy phrases like fair shake of the sauce bottle. Yeah, I think that's
40:21 Speaker 03 Was that being drunk?
40:22 Speaker 04 No, that's just giving someone a fair, you know, a fair crack at something.
40:24 Speaker 03 Okay.
40:25 Speaker 04 Kevin Rudd, who was PM for a while. He, he used the phrase fair shake of the sauce bottle so much during the 2013 election that it became a bit of a thing. He was trying to be blokey and he said, he also said fair suck of the pineapple. You've got to give people a fair suck of the pineapple, you know?
40:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
40:41 Speaker 04 I just, just these wonderful phrases.
40:43 Speaker 03 Yeah. I remember flying into Perth to do a film and they had a government sponsored billboard on the way from the airport saying, don't be a bloody idiot. Don't drink and drive. This is government.
40:52 Speaker 04 Yeah. Yeah. Well, they're very good at that, that the relaxed nature of Yeah, very good swearing, very good at being just a bit loose, as high up as Prime Minister.
41:01 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:02 Speaker 02 Can I ask Andy, this, the fact about they like it if you use Australian slang, is it from a study or something?
41:07 Speaker 04 It's from a study. Yeah, yeah. There was a study about what, what Australians like about people using their language. And it just found that using Australian slang is a pro, but only in an Aussie accent.
41:18 Speaker 03 So Australians like Australians?
41:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, it sounds that way.
41:21 Speaker 03 Well, so people, Australians like people who speak with an Australian accent. And then they like them additionally if they are able to be a bit relaxed and use something. Because it's very, I remember hearing one which was, I'm so hungry I could eat the arse out of a low flying pigeon.
41:37 Speaker 04 No.
41:37 Speaker 03 Which is kind of great.
41:39 Speaker 02 Again, was that Prime Minister who said that?
41:42 Speaker 04 And that's a sexy phrase that an American would find unbelievably attractive. I'm as full as a stripper's dance card.
41:48 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
41:50 Speaker 04 But I'm not using an Aussie accent, so this doesn't endear me to any of our Aussie listeners.
41:53 Speaker 03 No, it sounds like you're patronizing.
41:55 Speaker 04 Which I do not.
41:55 Speaker 03 Sounds like you're taking the piss out of your train.
41:57 Speaker 02 He is doing it. If you look at his face.
41:58 Speaker 03 How very dare you.
41:59 Speaker 04 Absolutely not.
42:01 Speaker 02 One person who pretended to have a Australian accent was Matthew McConaughey.
42:06 Speaker 04 Did he?
42:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, the actor.
42:08 Speaker 04 Yeah.
42:09 Speaker 03 Well, when he was acting or just pretended to be Australian on a train?
42:12 Speaker 02 Well, he lived in Australia for a little while. And then when he came back to America, he decided to keep the accent because all Americans find the Australian accent sexy. And the only real reason I bring it up is because Matthew McConaughey has a brother called Rooster, who has two children. One of them is called Margarita and the other one is called Miller Lite.
42:36 Speaker 04 Okay.
42:38 Speaker 02 Miller Lite. Miller Lite McConaughey.
42:41 Speaker 04 Is that a beer?
42:42 Speaker 02 It's a beer. And his brother got a lifetime supply of Miller Lite when he named his child Miller Lite McConaughey.
42:50 Speaker 04 Wow.
42:52 Speaker 02 Isn't that amazing?
42:52 Speaker 04 That is amazing.
42:53 Speaker 02 Soft topic, but I love it.
42:55 Speaker 04 Yeah. A lot of these Australian phrases sound rude, and I find this very interesting, but not all of them are. So I just like, one of the following phrases I'm going to read out is rude, okay? To point the bone at someone.
43:07 Speaker 04 To bore it up someone.
43:10 Speaker 04 On the vag.
43:13 Speaker 04 To asshole.
43:16 Speaker 04 Dogging, stiffen the lizards, golden donut, and to come the raw prawn.
43:22 Speaker 02 Okay.
43:23 Speaker 04 Only one of those is rude.
43:25 Speaker 02 Which what? But which one? The golden donut I'm gonna go for.
43:28 Speaker 04 Okay, let's go for the golden donut.
43:30 Speaker 03 Surely dogging means the same as it does here.
43:32 Speaker 04 Could do, could not.
43:34 Speaker 02 Oh, the raw prawn. What's that one?
43:35 Speaker 04 To come the raw prawn. It's not, you're not in a good place if you're coming the raw prawn.
43:41 Speaker 03 No.
43:41 Speaker 04 James is right.
43:43 Speaker 02 Is it?
43:43 Speaker 03 It's the golden donut.
43:43 Speaker 04 The golden donut is slang for the vagina. To come the raw prawn is simply to put something over on someone, to fool someone. Don't come the raw prawn with me. And you said dogging, Sally?
43:52 Speaker 03 Yeah.
43:52 Speaker 04 Just dingo hunting.
43:54 Speaker 03 Dogging.
43:55 Speaker 04 Yeah, to point, to point the bone at someone is to put a jinx on them. To bore it up someone is just to give them a walloping. On the vag means according to the provisions of the vagrancy act.
44:09 Speaker 04 To asshole is to dismiss someone peremptorily and stiffen the lizards is an exclamation of surprise.
44:15 Speaker 02 Very good.
44:16 Speaker 04 Stone the cries and stiffen the lizards.
44:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, right.
44:18 Speaker 03 You know the Aussie salute?
44:20 Speaker 02 What's that?
44:21 Speaker 03 It's not rude, it's just waving away flies.
44:24 Speaker 01 Oh, that's good. Well, that's the, there's an old theory, I think we've covered this on Fish, where that's how the modern Aussie accent developed, because there were so many flies, that the way you would talk to each other was with your teeth closed, so that you weren't getting in your mouth, and that's where the Aussie accent came from.
44:42 Speaker 03 Oh, really?
44:43 Speaker 02 Yeah. And actually, where it came from is, a load of people came over from Britain in 200 years ago, and it's quite similar to the Cockney accent around that time, but also loads of people went to Australia at the same time. Most of them were Cockneys, but there were people from other places, and then over the years, like, the kids would hang out together and they had to sort of understand what each other was saying, because actually accents were quite intelligible back in those days. And eventually, after one or two generations, it's called levelling, all the kids start talking the same way, and then all the adults, well, they grow up and then their kids do.
45:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, right.
45:21 Speaker 04 It's kind of evolution, isn't it?
45:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, kind of, but it's like a forced evolution, and it's quite a quick evolution.
45:26 Speaker 03 With, it's not to do with Australia, but with gendered speech patterns, I remember reading this study, I mean, a long, again, a long time ago, but it says probably been more complex thought about it since, but that male children and female children had the same speech patterns until they went to nursery.
45:44 Speaker 02 Ah.
45:45 Speaker 03 And then they started declaring themselves with their speech patterns.
45:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:49 Speaker 03 Which is kind of interesting. And so women like me ape male speech patterns to seem intelligent, which is sort of wrong, isn't it? And I didn't realise I did this until I read this study, but, you know, I have a slightly lower voice and I'm sort of aping male speech patterns.
46:03 Speaker 01 Really?
46:04 Speaker 02 And it has been found that men and women, if you make your voice lower, you are more successful, on average, in life.
46:10 Speaker 04 Really?
46:11 Speaker 03 And that's what they did to Margaret Thatcher, isn't it?
46:12 Speaker 04 Good to know.
46:13 Speaker 03 There is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women, and there are families.
46:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:22 Speaker 03 She didn't speak like that before, it was higher in...
46:24 Speaker 02 That was her podcast, wasn't it? No such thing as society. We have children who are three and a bit older. Have your kids started talking like Bluey, the cartoon character from Australia?
46:39 Speaker 01 Oh.
46:40 Speaker 02 And there is a lot of every now and then you see articles in the newspapers of saying, all our kids have started talking like Bluey now.
46:47 Speaker 01 Hmm.
46:48 Speaker 02 Similarly, about 10 years ago, everyone's kids were talking like Pingu or like the Teletubbies.
46:53 Speaker 01 Or Peppa Pig.
46:54 Speaker 02 Or Peppa Pig, yeah.
46:56 Speaker 04 Yes, I mean, no, no.
46:58 Speaker 02 No. But what people are finding that their kids are using Aussie slang, especially in America. So they'll say rubbish instead of garbage or whatever.
47:08 Speaker 01 Are you on the veg?
47:12 Speaker 01 It's the golden donut for me.
47:15 Speaker 02 But actually, according to linguists, kids very early, like certainly by the time they're three years old, can tell the difference between the way that a character is speaking and the way that their family and friends speak. So if they are talking a little bit like Bluey or Pingu or Teletubbies or Peppa Pig, they're doing it knowing that that's a character.
47:34 Speaker 04 I think it's a register rather than the way they're speaking forever now. Because otherwise, just all all British children would speak in American. As in, there's so much American media consumed that you would just.
47:43 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
47:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:44 Speaker 03 Well, that's why there's such a push to have homegrown children's programming.
47:48 Speaker 04 Right.
47:49 Speaker 03 That's it's a, you know, political thing.
47:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:52 Speaker 03 In all different countries.
47:54 Speaker 01 I think the the idea of this kind of turn of phrase from Australia, the international grab onto it really comes down to, in my opinion, one generation of Aussies that moved over here, and that's Barry Humphries, that's Jermaine Greer, it's Clive James, and then I'm going to add Paul Hogan into that as well, because I think Paul Hogan, more than anyone, really turned Australia into a tourist destination through the advert campaign with put a shrimp on the barbie, which is a phrase that's still used to this day, even though in Australia it's called prawns, right? So it was Americanifying the term that we would use in Australia. But I was reading about Paul Hogan because I didn't really know his story. So Paul Hogan is Crocodile Dundee, for those who don't know his his real name.
48:38 Speaker 01 He used to work on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He was a rigger on the Sydney Harbour Bridge while it was being constructed. And the reason he became famous is there was a show in Australia called New Faces. And he decided, yeah, he decided he was going to enter. So he did as a tap dancing knife thrower. Now, he neither knew how to tap dance or throw knives.
48:58 Speaker 02 Were they poo knives or?
49:03 Speaker 02 Because I would watch that and regret his Got Talent, someone throwing poo knives at Sam and Carol.
49:10 Speaker 01 He basically created-
49:12 Speaker 04 Look out, he's got a knife!
49:13 Speaker 02 That's not a knife, give me one second.
49:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, he faked it. He did the audition and they said, "Let us see the act." And he said, "Oh, it's a pretty dangerous act. I'll have to do it on the night, but roughly this is what I'll be doing." And they went, "That sounds great, come on." And so he made it to main TV, which was live at the time, and that was his first break.
49:37 Speaker 04 Did he do it?
49:38 Speaker 01 That's how he got... No, he didn't know how to do any of it.
49:40 Speaker 02 What did he do? What happened?
49:41 Speaker 01 He threw the knives at the ground, he made fun of the judges, and this Aussie witch came out of him because he became a big comedian in Australia at his own TV show.
49:49 Speaker 03 And were you there then? Do you remember that?
49:50 Speaker 01 No, no, no, that was way-
49:51 Speaker 03 Before, you must be much younger than me.
49:52 Speaker 01 I don't think I was even born at that point, yeah.
49:54 Speaker 04 Just one more thing about slang in general. So, we mentioned earlier that people don't like sometimes being in the dictionary. So, there was a survey in 2014, and more than half of people said it wasn't appropriate for words like "yolo" to be in the dictionary, right? But I just love this. This was, I think, a YouGov thing. In order to survey people's knowledge of slang terms, they had to ask them, "Do you know what this slang term means?", and they had to come up with alternatives of what these words might mean.
50:20 Speaker 01 Okay.
50:21 Speaker 04 So, "yolo", 9% of people surveyed thought it was a yogurt made with caramel and chocolate.
50:29 Speaker 04 "Cray", 15% thought it was having a strong or unpleasant smell of fish.
50:35 Speaker 01 Brilliant, lovely. And it's crazy, we should say, for anyone who doesn't know that.
50:39 Speaker 04 "Man's plain", as Dan just did about the meaning of cray.
50:45 Speaker 04 28% thought that was "a man who is especially plain", "man's plain" still describes me.
50:52 Speaker 04 And finally, I love this one. 3% of people thought the Bank of Mum and Dad is a place where semen is kept in cold storage for use in artificial insemination.
51:02 Speaker 03 But this was multi-guest, right? They gave them options.
51:05 Speaker 04 They gave them two options. So 97% got the Bank of Mum and Dad right, but 3% thought it was the old sperm freezer.
51:11 Speaker 03 But it's the witty people who wrote the thing.
51:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, I know. It's lovely. Isn't that great?
51:16 Speaker 02 Do you know what the slang term to swallow a dick means? Not anymore, this was 18th century, or 19th century.
51:23 Speaker 01 Is it Aussie or just general?
51:24 Speaker 02 It's British, actually. English. You've asked us this before. It relates to something else we've said today.
51:29 Speaker 03 Be dead on a plane.
51:32 Speaker 02 The other one.
51:34 Speaker 04 The other linguistic... Oh, Merriam-Webster, the dictionary.
51:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:37 Speaker 04 Swallow a dictionary.
51:38 Speaker 03 Swallow a dick. Yeah, oh, right.
51:39 Speaker 02 It's someone who knows lots of long words or uses lots of long words. They've swallowed a dick.
51:44 Speaker 04 Very annoying.
51:45 Speaker 01 Sally, do you have a favourite Aussie-ism?
51:47 Speaker 03 Australian actors, they say, happy to be here, easy to work with. So when things get really bad, you say, happy to be here, easy to work with. You don't complain about anything. Yeah, too easy, mate. I think the mentality is completely fantastic. And that's what I was thinking last year when I was there, thinking this is actually the best place. You know, when the whole world is, looks like it's going tits up and there's so much sort of fear and threat of war. Australia is such a positive place. Like, it's having such a moment in fashion and film and it's just a nice, safe place to be.
52:19 Speaker 02 I would say that that, generally speaking, is true, but you want to try mispronouncing some of their place names on a popular podcast. They suddenly, that easygoing attitude just disappears.
52:34 Speaker 01 Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this show, we can all be found on our online accounts. I'm on at Shriberland on Instagram. James?
52:48 Speaker 02 My Instagram is nositsfingersjamesharkin.
52:51 Speaker 01 Andy?
52:51 Speaker 04 Mine is at AndrewHunterM.
52:53 Speaker 01 And Sally, you're on Instagram, right?
52:54 Speaker 03 I think I'm Sallysmack.
52:56 Speaker 01 Yes.
52:57 Speaker 03 Because I was once in a show that had the word smack in the title, rather than because I take smack.
53:06 Speaker 03 Or like being smacked or hammered. I should change. Should I change that?
53:11 Speaker 01 No, never change.
53:14 Speaker 01 Well, listen, if you want to get through to us about any of the things that we've said, we're also available on podcast at qi.com. You can send us all of your Australian pronunciation complaints to Andy there. We'll bring them up most likely in an episode of Drop Us A Line. That's our secret show that you can only get access to if you are a member of Club Fish. This is a very exciting group of people who love our show so much that they are willing to go behind a paywall to experience extra goodies. And we've got so much great stuff there from bonus episodes all the way through to a quarterly quiz. So if you want to be part of that, just go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish. Check it out. Otherwise, just come back here next week because we're going to be back with another episode. We will see you then. Goodbye.
54:08 Speaker 04 She's been thinking about the sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies
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