342. Valerie Fridland — Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2023

⏱️ 122 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Paranoid about the “ums” and “uhs” that pepper your presentations? Bewildered by “hella” or the meteoric rise of “so”? Can the word “dude” help people bond across social divides? Why are we always trying to make our intensifiers ever more intense? Are these language tics, habits, and developments in our speech a sign of cultural and linguistic degeneration? Fridland weaves together history, psychology, science, and laugh-out-loud anecdotes to explain why we speak the way we do today, and how that impacts what our kids may be saying tomorrow.

Shermer and Fridland discuss: Okay, Boomer language • accents • ChatGPT • gender pronouns • gender differences in language use • forensic language analysis • evolution of language • why children learn language naturally but must be taught to read and write • literature, film, and TV’s influence on language use • cancel culture and taboo language • language and identity politics • y’all, contractions, and other language shortcuts • tracking human migrations by language, and vice versa • Fargo, and more.

Valerie Fridland is a professor of linguistics in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. She writes a popular language blog on Psychology Today called “Language in the Wild,” and is also a professor for The Great Courses series.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. My guest today is Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the English
0:18.6	Department of the University of Nevada Reno.
0:21.0	She writes a popular language blog on Psychology today. Oh, I also read some of those. Those were good.
0:25.0	Called Language in the Wild and is also a professor for the great courses series.
0:30.0	Wondrium is one of our sponsors of the show on language so it's really cool the new book is called this
0:36.4	is such a great title like literally dude arguing for good in bad English. Yes, okay, so let's just start there. You know, I listen to your course, you don't sound like you're from the South at all.
0:48.0	What's your background? I am, I grew up in the South in Memphis, Tennessee actually, but my parents are both
0:55.4	native French speakers. My father's Belgian and my mother's French Canadian and
0:59.7	you know at the time I grew up I'm not going to age myself, but it was a while ago.
1:04.1	I'll just say that.
1:05.1	I didn't really, we didn't have a lot of southern friends because we were exotic,
1:09.7	you know, and the South is, especially at that time, kind of closed knit and you know generations of your family grow up there and that's who you hang out with so we hung out with basically other I call them southern expats
1:22.0	So most of my friends didn't have southern accents and then I went to a
1:25.8	school where a lot of other kids that were from out of the area went to school so
1:30.6	with having French speaking parents and then not a lot of friends from the
1:34.1	south until I got a little older, I really never developed much of a southern accent, although it does come
1:39.7	out on a few things I'll say, especially when I was a little younger and I spent more time there.
1:44.1	So if you listen very closely, sometimes you can get subtle hints of my southernness.
1:49.1	Mm, nice.
1:50.3	So you don't have to work at it like those actresses. Who's that actress that was married to Tom Cruise? Nice. you never know she has an accident then you hear talking like in some regular
2:03.8	interview it's like oh wow so I guess it's possible to just override it I have no
2:09.1	idea how that's done but that's why I'm not an actor. Well, that's a very limited, sort of heavy cognitive resource use of getting rid of an accent.
	...

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