This is a Headgun Podcast.

Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam

Connover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert

about all the amazing things that they know that I don't know and that you might not

know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together. We're going to have so much

fun this week. We're talking about language. You know, people are constantly arguing about

what the right and wrong ways to use language are as though the rules of language were encoded

by some grammar God from on high, but they're not. Language isn't a set of objective rules

like math. No language is created, changed, and used by people. And that means it will

always resist our attempts to control it. There was actually a funny example of this the

other year in the UK, a London primary school made a bold attempt to ban slang. And by

bold, I mean pointless and stupid. I mean, how are you going to stop teens from beginning

sentences with because like or basically this school even tried to ban phrases like he

cut his eyes at me, which I mean, come on, that's not just slang. That's poetry. That

sounds like Shakespeare, man. And it's a phrase along with many others that were banned

that originated among marginalized people controlling language like this seems to be more

about limiting the influence of certain people rather than the words themselves. And at

the end of the day, it won't work because again, language is created by people and people

are irrepressible. If you set up a linguistic rule, you would better believe some enterprising

kid is going to come along and break it. And when they do, they are going to use that

new word phrase or sentence structure to mean something new because that is what language

fucking does, bro. Now, none of that stops language from being a constant culture war

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