Hey, I'm Ryan Eggled from TV shows like New Amsterdam, The Blacklist, and of course, leave it to Beaver. You're on that? I was the Beaver. Didn't know. And I'm Adam Rose, an actor on TV, blue cardigan guy on your social medias, and Avid Speedwalker. We're the hosts of Small Stupid Stuff, an important new podcast from Studio 71. Ryan and I talk about the big issues, the heavy questions, pressing topics.

Like coffee date etiquette?

Best time to eat cereal.

And of course, whether you put your toilet paper over or under or around.

I don't know what around is.

I don't either, but I'm definitely an over man.

Yeah.

Every episode, we're joined by a celebrity guest who gives us their hottest takes on the stupidest,

smallest stuff.

Jocco Sims, Michelle Carrey, Alex Breckenridge, Pete Haversberger, Amber Childers.

Our goal is to solve the world's problems by finally figuring out the truth about crap that doesn't

matter.

So listen to Small Stupid Stuff on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And watch us on YouTube, new episodes every Tuesday.

Stop.

From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter. I teach linguistics at Columbia University. My next two books are words on the move from Holt and Talking Back, Talking Black from Bellevue Literary Press, and you can catch things I write on language and other things at CNN, The Atlantic, and whoever will have me at any given time.

I'm honored to be guest hosting Lexicon Valley for the summer, and my topic this week is Disorder, which is not my favorite thing, especially when it comes to language, where my bias is system, process, language acting like a machine. Of course, all languages leak,

as the great linguist anthropologist Edward Sapir told us, and part of truly embracing language is to

understand that there will always be things like the fact that you say, aren't I finished,

rather than am and I finished, even though you would never say I are.

But overall, what many linguists do is describe language as rules, like lines of computer code.

In that light, there are things about language that seem unruly.

...