46: Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2020

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How are you? Thanks, no problem. Stock, ritualistic social phrases like these, which are used more to indicate a particular social context rather than for the literal meaning of the words inside have a name in linguistics -- they’re called phatics! In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the social dance of phatic expressions. We talk about common genres of phatics, including greetings, farewells, and thanking; how ordinary phrases come to take on a social meaning versus how existing phatic expressions can become literal again; and how phatics differ across languages and mediums, including speech, letters, email, and social media. This month’s bonus episode is about music and linguistics! Both speech and music can involve making sounds using the human body, but they also have differences. Different cultures highlight the similarities and differences between music and language in various ways, which we’ve received lots of questions about! In this episode, we talk about how languages with tone deal differently with matching up those tones to musical pitches, mapping drums and whistles onto language sounds in order to communicate across long distances, using linguistics to analyze genres of music like opera and beatboxing, and that time Gretchen went on holiday and actually ended up getting a demonstration of the whistled language Silbo Gomero. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to get access to this and 40 other bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord. Announcements: Gretchen’s book about internet language, Because Internet, is available in paperback! It includes a section on phatic expressions in email and social media as well as lots of other things about how we talk to each other online, including emoji, memes, what internet generation you belong to, a small cameo from Lauren and Lingthusiasm, and more! You can also still get the audiobook version, read by Gretchen herself (no Lauren though, sorry). It also makes a great gift for anyone you communicate with online. For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/623851629729464320/lingthusiasm-episode-46-hey-no-problem-bye-the

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Linguiseum, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:23.2	I'm Lauren Gorn.
0:24.5	And I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:25.7	And today we're getting enthusiastic about fattics, the parts of conversation that we use for their social meaning rather than their literal meaning.
0:33.2	But first, exciting book news.
0:37.0	The paperback version of my book about internet language, because internet, is out in the world very, very shortly.
0:44.2	Or possibly after, if you're listening to this, more than a few days after it came out.
0:47.4	If you've been thinking about buying because internet and you're like, I just need it to be cuter,
0:53.2	the paperback version is officially 200% cuter. It is
0:56.8	so tiny and cute. Or if you're a person who likes to have the spines of book been between your pages
1:01.9	as you read them, I understand. You can now get that in paperback. This is a book all about various
1:07.2	aspects of language of the internet. We did a whole episode last year when it came
1:11.3	out in Hardback, about various aspects of internet language when it comes to emoji, and we'll
1:15.9	be talking a bit more about internet-y things in this episode as well. So if you like the thinking
1:20.5	about how we text and how we email and how we use memes and all of these types of things,
1:25.5	or if you want to know how other people are doing these things, this is a useful book for you. You can still buy the hardback or listen to the
1:32.5	audiobook if, for some reason, you are not into adorably cute, very bendable paperbacks.
1:39.2	Yes, people have been saying very nice things to me about the audio recording, which I did
1:43.2	myself. So if you like
1:44.5	hearing my voice on this podcast and you would like to hear my voice for like nine hours straight
1:49.2	without any Lauren, you can also do that with the audiobook. I should record a little
1:54.6	back channel track for people who just want to pretend it's an extended version of the podcast.
	...

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