Lingthusiasm Episode 106: Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions
We asked you if a burrito was a sandwich, and you said 'no'. We asked you if ravioli was a sandwich and you said 'heck no'. We asked you if an ice cream sandwich was a sandwich and things...started to get a little murky. This isn't just a sandwich problem: you can also have similar arguments about what counts as a cup, a bird, a fish, furniture, art, and more!
So wait...does any word mean anything anymore? Have we just broken language?? It's okay, linguistics has a solution!
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about why deciding what's in and what's out of the definition of a word is so dang tricky, why people love to argue about it, and how prototype theory solves all the "is X a Y" arguments once and for all.
Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 9: Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all. We’ve added an updated announcements section to the top and a few new things about prototypes and meaning to the end. We’re excited to share one of our favourite bonus episodes from Patreon with a broader audience, while at the same time giving everyone who works on the show a bit of a break.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about fictional gestures with Eric Molinsky, host of Imaginary Worlds, a podcast about sci-fi, fantasy and other genres of speculative fiction! We talk about the Vulcan salute from Star Trek, the Wakanda Forever salute from Black Panther, and the three-finger Hunger Games salute, and how all three have crossed over with additional symbolism into the real world. We also talk about gestures that have crossed over in the other direction, from the real-world origins of the Vulcan salute in a Jewish blessing, the two-finger blessing in the Foundation tv series from classical Latin and Greek oratory via Christian traditions, as well as religious gesture in the Penric and Desdemona series, smiles and shrugs in A Memory Called Empire, and more.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Original episode on Patreon: 'Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all'
Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'Liveshow Q and eh'
Wikipedia entry for 'Prototype Theory'
'Memes in Digital Culture' by Limor Shifman
Ann Leckie on Fangirl Happy Hour
Jaffa cake: cake or biscuit? (UK)
Crostini: bread or biscuit? (Aus)
Tomato: fruit or vegetable?
cup vs. bowl vs. vase
cup vs. mug
No Such Thing as a Fish (podcast)
Wikipedia entry for 'Harlem Shake'
Wikipedia entry for 'Numa Numa'
Wikipedia entry for 'Gangnam Style'
Lingthusiasm episode 'Translating the untranslatable'
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
these are some features of my own ideolect and your mileage may vary.
burned v burnt
I feel like both of these are valid past participles of the verb 'burn.' however, they are not totally synonymous: 'burned' as an adjective describes the end result of a burning-event. 'burnt' on the other hand, describes the state of being burnt, without necessary reference to the act of burning.
take v bring
I was thinking of how to tell Spanish 'llevar' rom 'traer.' and I feel like they correspond to 'take' and 'bring' respectively. that is, both verbs describe the act of A personally relocating B from location C to location D. however, while 'take' emphasizes the sub-event of removal (of B from C), 'bring' does not. that is, a bringing-event is showing up somewhere with something, and a taking-event is removing something from somewhere and bringing it (showing up with it) somewhere else.
Transcript Episode 106: Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.
[Music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about “What even is a sandwich, and how does meaning even work anyway?”
Gretchen: This episode totally blew our minds when we were researching the classic internet debate.
Lauren: But first, this episode was originally posted as our 9th bonus episode in November 2017.
Gretchen: Oh my gosh, it was from our first year. We have been doing monthly bonus episodes since 2017 for people who support us at the Ling-thusiast level or above. The support of patrons is literally the way the show keeps running and helps us not have to think about running ads or exposing you to other things you don’t wanna listen to.
Lauren: We now have over 100 bonus episodes in the Patreon bonus feed for you to listen to right now and new ones that come out every month.
Gretchen: Our bonus episodes are often a little bit more playful and less likely to be used in a linguistics classroom, like our several swearing bonus episodes.
Lauren: Or the whole bonus episode on the linguistics of kissing.
Gretchen: But overall, we have as much fun with bonus episodes as our mains. We love them so much, we wanted to share one from the archive on the main feed.
Lauren: It also gives us a chance to catch a bit of a break between preparing new episodes.
Gretchen: This was something we did last year as well, and it really helps us during a busy period.
Lauren: Indeed, there’re multiple reasons to love this tradition that we’ve started. We’re gonna play the original episode. We are gonna skip the intro with updates from 2017.
Gretchen: Ooo, what was the hot news in 2017?
Lauren: We were heading towards full-length bonus episodes – a thing we have been doing for almost eight years now.
Gretchen: I had almost forgotten that these bonus episodes weren’t full length to start.
Lauren: We literally didn’t have the money to pay Claire to edit full-length bonuses for us a year into making the show.
Gretchen: That explains why this was only about 20 minutes of tape. We were also celebrating our first official anniversary month.
Lauren: Of course, because it was and is November, our anniversary. That’s so lovely.
Gretchen: We’re gonna revisit an episode from when we were a year into the show. We’ll listen along with you. And then I look forward to chatting with you at the end about other things that we’ve observed about this topic.
Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was all about linguistics landscapes and the way language is visible or not in the spaces around us.
Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to access this and many other bonus episodes including the original version of this episode with the announcements still intact.
[Music]
Lauren: We ran a poll with a very simple question: "Which of the following 20 items is a sandwich?"
Gretchen: If any!
Lauren: And people had opinions, I think it's fair to say.
Gretchen: Yeah. This was, I think, maybe one of our more participated polls.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Definitely got the most comments because we didn't manage to include a "none of the above" option because we ran up the max on the Patreon polls. We're not gonna list all 20, because I assume you can see those, but I think of the most "sandwich" things, people were kind of most content to consider a hamburger a sandwich, maybe; bagel and cream cheese a sandwich; and an ice cream sandwich a sandwich. I mean. it's got “sandwich” in the name! Like, it has to be a sandwich, right?
Lauren: Yeah. Things like burritos, pop-tarts, ravioli, apple pie didn't really rate very highly.
Gretchen: Macarons, I don't know – they seem very sandwich-y to me. They've got like, things on either side, and like a filling, and same with Oreos, like, they're sandwich cookies. That's their genre of cookie.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Do you have sandwich biscuits?
Lauren: Yeah. Sandwich biscuits is a type of biscuit; but are they a type of sandwich?
Gretchen: And like, apple pie has a crust on the top and bottom, that's why I picked apple in particular. Anyway, I came to the conclusion on making this list that actually a book is a sandwich.
Lauren: [laughs] On what grounds?
Gretchen: It's got covers on either side, which is like, the bread, and then it's got the pages in between, which is like the filling.
Lauren: And I guess I am known to devour a book, too.
Gretchen: I mean, some people might say that a sandwich needs to be edible.
Lauren: Yeah. Some people who are me might say that you are deliberately picking features of “sandwich”' and applying them to “book.”
Gretchen: Some people might say that that's true, and that I am going slightly loopy working on my own book too much.
Lauren: You do have books on the brain.
Gretchen: I have books on the brain.
Lauren: Patron Lauren, thanks for mentioning in the comments of the poll an episode of a podcast in which Ann Leckie argues that a cheesecake is neither a pie or a cake, but it is actually a sandwich.
Gretchen: See, I think a book is more of a sandwich than a cheesecake is a sandwich.
Lauren: But it shows that even if we can't articulate – and we might say like, some features – we clearly have some idea of what a sandwich is, and some things either fit that idea or they don't fit that idea.
Gretchen: The other thing is, is it's not just sandwiches that we have these kinds of problems for.
Lauren: No. It is not just sandwiches. That would make life very easy.
Gretchen: You could say, you know, is a cheesecake instead a type of pizza?
Lauren: No. No!
Gretchen: It a pizza a type of sandwich?
Lauren: Um, probably not. I can have these very like, "Yes! No!" reactions.
Gretchen: Yeah, we've got these gut reactions; and it's less about somebody playing devil's advocate and kind of advocating for sandwich anarchism, or sandwich orthodoxy – it's a fun game to play with your friends. Try it with your friends. But there's a bigger question, right? There's lots of things where the boundaries are not completely clear.
Lauren: And they sometimes have really important implications. There was a famous piece of British case law where there was a discussion about whether Jaffa cakes were a cake or a biscuit because they attracted different levels of taxation. Maybe there was one about breadsticks, where the breadsticks were a biscuit or a bread because bread is taxed lower than biscuits.
Gretchen: And there's the famous like, “Is the tomato sauce on pizza, or is ketchup, a vegetable?” for the purposes of like, your food guide.
Lauren: These things have really important implications, even though we kind of joke about it sometimes. We're again gonna talk about English, because that is a language that people listening to the show have some level of introspection about, but these things do happen across different languages, and they differ across different languages. Chris – again in the Patreon comments – on the topic of whether a cheesecake was a cake or a pie, said, you know, as a non-native English speaker – a very high-functioning non-native English speaker – he really struggles with these categories in English, because in German there are completely different categories where different things fall into. So, “Kuchen” in German covers pie and cake, and “Torte” is something that is neither a pie or a cake, it's like a fancy cake.
Gretchen: I always just assumed, because I speak enough German at least to be able to kind of pronounce these words but not enough to have intuitions about it, that “Kuchen” was basically cake, and “Torte” was basically pie, because I figured it was like tart. But I guess that's not true at all.
Lauren: Your limited intuitions are insufficient for a native speaker.
Gretchen: Yeah. This is a problem that I run into in Montreal as well. French has – the word for “cookie” is “biscuit,” which is fine, because you're like, "Oh, yeah, that's like ‘biscuit,’ we can do this," but then some cookies are also “galette.” And I have still not quite figured out what makes something a “biscuit” or what makes something a “galette.” Like I think galettes tend to be bigger, and maybe flatter. But like I don't know if I see a given.
Lauren: You're trying to build up your own concept of what it is.
Gretchen: Yeah, and like I clearly need to just eat more pastry in order to solve this problem.
Lauren: What I find really difficult about “sandwich” is that I am someone who has quite a narrow prototype of what a sandwich is. Like it needs to be made of, like, sliced loaf bread generally at least one on each side with some kind of filling. But as soon as the bread is like – if it's toasted, then that's a toasted cheese sandwich, which is a subtype of sandwich, not a prototypical sandwich. But having said that, the verb “to sandwich'” something, for me, is incredibly broad. You can sandwich any – like you can sandwich two books together. And I think the thing that's really difficult for me is that I can sandwich any foodstuffs together and eat them, but it's not a sandwich.
Gretchen: Oh dear, that runs into problems.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: I mean, that's kind of like our ice cream sandwich problem, right? Because like, an ice cream sandwich very clearly takes a sandwich as a model, and says, "Okay, well, if we put a cookie on either side of ice cream, then it would be an ice cream sandwich," and it's got “sandwich” in the name.
Lauren: It's a subtype of ice cream, not a subtype of sandwich.
Gretchen: Yeah, it's ice cream, sandwiched.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Rather than a sandwich made out of ice cream.
Lauren: You could have an ice cream sandwich – like you could have a sandwich with ice cream in it. Which is how – in Singapore, you can get ice cream between two wafers, or you can get it in a piece of folded bread.
Gretchen: Huh! Okay.
Lauren: And that is a closer approximation of a sandwich.
Gretchen: That – I’ve not tried that.
Lauren: It's very fluffy sweet white bread.
Gretchen: Then is it kind of like cake?
Lauren: Yeah. So, all of this debate is actually a really important thing to deal with when you study semantics, which is the meaning of words. And a lot of it has been discussed within something that's called “prototype theory” – trying to understand what prototypical representation of a word people carry in their head, and how that affects whether they agree that something is or isn't a type of that thing.
Gretchen: I love prototype theory, because it just makes everything make so much sense. If say, “Lauren, give me an example of a bird."
Lauren: Uh, robin?
Gretchen: Yep. Another bird?
Lauren: They test reaction time in prototype theory. I think that's very important to note. Another bird would be a magpie.
Gretchen: Okay, good. Yeah. Like crow, like a raven.
Lauren: Cockatoo.
Gretchen: Yeah. These are the types of things that people often say immediately when you ask them about a bird, and then it takes like a lot of prodding – and they're much less likely to say initially, "Oh, penguin," or “emu,” or “ostrich.”
Lauren: Or, like, a very specific type of eagle.
Gretchen: You know, like the Canada goose as opposed to “goose” in general, or something.
Lauren: Oh yeah, ducks are birds, aren't they.
Gretchen: [laughs] Yes, they are! A prototypical bird has a beak, has feathers, has wings – or they're unlikely say like, "a dinosaur.”
Lauren: Yes.
Gretchen: But if you ask someone for a prototypical dinosaur, they're gonna say like, “a t-rex,” or like, “a brontosaurus” – if we still think brontosauruses are real. I'm not caught up on the latest in dinosaurs. They're less likely to say like “a pterodactyl.”
Lauren: And not “a chicken.”
Gretchen: The other ones I don't know.
Lauren: You did pretty good. You named like three or four. These are exemplars. They're the most prototypical items that people will come up with.
Gretchen: Yeah. And they're the easiest to identify. They're the easiest to come up with. If we're trying to create a category “birds,” we could be like, "Okay, well they have wings; they have feathers; they can fly; they have a beak," and then you're like "Oh, but what about a penguin? They don't have feathers, do they? They definitely can't fly."
Lauren: No.
Gretchen: They do have a beak though.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Do all birds have beaks? I don't even know. I'm doubting myself now.
Lauren: I'm gonna say yes. Well, ducks have bills.
Gretchen: Is a bill the same as a beak?
Lauren: Is a bill a subtype of beak?
Gretchen: I don't know!
Lauren: This is what most semantics classes descend into. Sitting there going, "Is a bill a type of beak?"
Gretchen: [laughs] Right! But there definitely are flightless birds. There definitely are featherless birds, or mostly featherless birds. Or if you get something like a prototypical mammal – which “mammal” is a scientific category, so it's defined more precisely – but like a prototypical mammal is gonna be something like a horse or a dog. And then you're like, "Yeah, okay, an elephant is a mammal because, like, it does have hair, but like it's got, like, 14 hairs on the top of its head. It's not furry, like a dog is.” But one of the really interesting examples about this is, if we think about birds, in the Bible – is what I've been told – the word for “bird” is actually used to also encompass bats.
Lauren: Huh! Why not!
Gretchen: And now we're like, “Aha! Those silly ancient people. They didn't realise that bats were different.” But realistically speaking, for most practical purposes, bats are a lot closer to birds. Like, they swoop around your head the way birds do. They're not very useful farm animals like mammals. And so practically speaking, their ontology for what their equivalent word for “bird” meant was "flying thing in the sky.”
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: It wasn't "thing with feathers and so on and so forth." It was "flying thing in the sky,” and they didn't really have penguins in the Middle East thousands of years ago. I think I'm probably pretty safe to say that.
Lauren: Big claims there.
Gretchen: We’re gonna definitely make some zoological errors in this episode.
Lauren: But that's because they're working with our native speaker intuitions, and not with a scientific categorisation.
Gretchen: Yeah! Exactly. The categorisation of how they were slicing up the universe was actually recreated and remade by scientists, centuries, millennia later. And people at the time – they were using the same word to name both of those things.
Lauren: I teach prototype theory when I teach semantics because I love it. And like, people who don't say anything else for the rest of semester suddenly start having opinions and talking, and you get a whole class arguing. One famous one –
Gretchen: [laughs] This is Lauren's Teaching Tips! Pro tips.
Lauren: Yeah, Lauren's Teacher Tips: just get everyone really angry. One very famous one that was used by – I think it was used by Bill Labov to get examples of people saying particular words.
Gretchen: Yeah, I think he was looking at vowels.
Lauren: He would give them pictures of things that could be cups or mugs and a whole range of things in between (and the pictures are up as a link on the show notes). You get people saying, "That is not a mug! What are you talking about!
Gretchen: "That's clearly a cup! This one's definitely – no, are you serious?"
Lauren: "That handle is not the handle of a cup."
Gretchen: But what he's actually looking for is the vowels.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And what it does is it reduces people's self-consciousness because everyone really wants to have this argument, and so you get like thousands of tokens of the /ʌ/ in “cup” and “mug,” and then you can do phonetics on them based on these arguments people are having. And you can tell they're not being self-conscious about their vowels because they're so busy caring about the meaning.
Lauren: I worked in a homeware store for a while, and one day we had a new range of stock, and I lost my mind because they carried something that was called a “cug.”
Gretchen: Whoa!
Lauren: I was just like "This was the solution! We just needed to eliminate both of those prototypes and come up with a hybrid prototype."
Gretchen: Yeah. I guess a “mup” sounds like a muppet?
Lauren: It is much less transparent. I also have a friend who took semantics with me many, many years ago and still will occasionally bring up how she is unable to decide whether a fake Da Vinci is a DaVinci and whether a fake gun is a type of gun.
Gretchen: Wait, what?
Lauren: There’re two for you to introspect on. So, is a is a fake gun a type of gun?
Gretchen: Um, I guess? Maybe? Is it?
Lauren: Like, people will use them in crime-ing, and you can be charged with carrying a weapon for having a fake gun.
Gretchen: Okay, okay, yeah. And you're not allowed to bring them on an airplane.
Lauren: But is a fake Mona Lisa a Mona Lisa?
Gretchen: Yeah, that's not the Mona Lisa. Because the Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa. But like, if it's trying to pass as the Mona Lisa – but if I buy a poster of the Mona Lisa from the gift shop, and like, I know it's not THE Mona Lisa, but I put it up in my house, and someone's like, "Oh, you have the Mona Lisa on your wall.” Everybody knows that I am not wealthy enough to have bought the actual Mona Lisa; I've just bought a reproduction. In the context where it's not trying to pass itself off as the Mona Lisa. This is really hard.
Lauren: But trying to think about why is quite difficult. Thanks to Melanie in the comments who mentioned she did one of these prototype assignments when she studied semantics about what is a type of shoe.
Gretchen: Yeah, like is it “a shoe,” or is it “a boot,” or like, is it “a sandal”?
Lauren: And she said, "When you would ask people why this is or isn't a type of boot, they'd be like, ‘Well, it just is! I just know, okay? That's how it is’." It's difficult, and as we mentioned, it varies across languages, but it also varies across cultures or social contexts. I remember when I came to visit you in Montreal, and we went on a Canadian Tire excursion, and you were trying to explain to me what type of store it is.
Gretchen: Yeah, so when we were having the live show, we actually had so many people come that we had to buy them extra chairs for the bookstore, which is a great problem to have. But it meant that I got to take Lauren on an 11th-hour excursion to Canadian Tire to buy some more folding chairs. I was trying to explain – because obviously Canadian Tire I assume is only a Canadian store.
Lauren: You assume correctly.
Gretchen: Yeah. And I was like, "Well, initially they started out as a tire store, obviously, and they had like other stuff you could repair your car with. And then, you know, then you can buy like hammers and nails and stuff, so I guess that's a hardware store. But like, they also sell, you know, folding chairs and clothes and dishes. But like, they're not a department store.”
Lauren: They don't sell all the things a department store sells.
Gretchen: Well, department stores generally sell clothes, right. Well, they kind of sell some clothes, but like, not many clothes.
Lauren: Not reliably.
Gretchen: You wouldn't go there for clothes, but you might happen to see some clothes there.
Lauren: And so, part of trying to explain what Canadian Tire is, is finding a prototype analogy.
Gretchen: I don't know. I don't know what kind of a category of a store it is. But I know what kind of stuff would be there, even if I don't know specifically what's there. I'm like, "Oh yeah. Of course that would be there." This is a problem that I run into in stores because in my mind oatmeal is a baking ingredient.
Lauren: Right, whereas it's cereal ingredient. It's a breakfast ingredient.
Gretchen: But in the minds of most people who design grocery stores, it's a breakfast ingredient. And so, I'm always sitting there by the flour, being like, "Where the heck is the oatmeal?"
Lauren: Not near the flour.
Gretchen: No, it's not with the flour. It's not with the flour and sugar and vanilla and stuff. It's with the cornflakes.
Lauren: Yeah. Where it should be. It coincides with my prototype, so I'm happy for that.
Gretchen: No!
Lauren: I feel like I also have really strong intuitions about what a meme is. Occasionally, you get people who don't know what an internet meme is, and you're like, I don't even know where to start. Or you get people who have very different intuitions about what a meme is. Like, for me – and I think this is just because I did some linguistics papers on it and so had to think about it a lot – but for me like a lolcat – lolcats were the prototypical meme in my head. But now, like, they're a retro meme. No one even really thinks about them anymore. Having to get used to like, gif-based memes was actually a thing I had to expand my category of what a meme was.
Gretchen: Yeah. I was reading this book about – I think it's called Memes in Digital Culture by Limor Shifman. I was reading it as research for the book because, you know, one has to do a deep dive into the meme-ish literature, of which there are like three books.
Lauren: Very deep.
Gretchen: [laughs] Her examples – she was citing as a lot of her prototypes for memes, like, YouTube videos.
Lauren: What!
Gretchen: And I was like, "Really? YouTube videos?"
Lauren: Say what now?
Gretchen: Some of the examples were, like, the Numa Numa video.
Lauren: Yeah, that is, yeah.
Gretchen: Or like, the Harlem Shake, where you have this thing that everyone's doing that they're making videos of.
Lauren: True facts.
Gretchen: Right? I was like, "Wait." Or like, Gangnam Style, like everyone's making videos of this.
Lauren: Yeah, there we go.
Gretchen: Yeah!
Lauren: Already just had to expand my introspective category right there.
Lauren: Yes. And prototypes are kind of the way we learn. You know, we kind of give someone a lot of examples of something, and they create – and relatively consistently we all create an agreeable prototype of what a bird is and what a cake is and what bread is as we grow up.
Gretchen: Yeah, this is a fun example. It's from another podcast. The podcast is called No Such Thing as a Fish, and it's named after the fact that, scientifically, there is no definition of a fish.
Lauren: It's aprototype semantic category.
Gretchen: It's a prototype category only. There’s no – there way there’s definitions of a mammal where you're like, "Yeah, it feeds milk to its young and has fur and gives birth live, not eggs, and so on, except for platypuses, cause." But yeah, so there's no actual “fish,” scientifically speaking. Scientists don't talk about “fish.” You have like all of the different subspecies, but there's more differences between the different subspecies in the ocean than there are – there isn't a unifying thing that all of them have in common except for the fact that they're in the ocean – or lakes.
Lauren: And we think of them as fish.
Gretchen: Yeah, so we call them “fish.” You’re like, “But a trout is a fish. A salmon is a fish.” But maybe they actually don't have enough in common with each other.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Is a squid a fish?
Lauren: That is a very good question that I don't have any immediate introspection on because my semantic categories are now completely broken in my head from this episode.
Gretchen: I don't know what anything is.
Lauren: Thank you very much, Gretchen. If you ever want to get people chatting at a party, just throw in some very contentious, like, "Pizza is a type of sandwich" discussions, and people really get into it because people have really strong opinions about these things. As we saw in the poll, as you've seen in this episode, and as you'll be unable to escape when you look at anything for the rest of the day.
Gretchen: And one of the best ones – here's your homework question – is: What is furniture?
Lauren: Ah.
Gretchen: Is a chair furniture? Is a lamp furniture? Is a microwave furniture?
Lauren: I'm currently using packing boxes to record this episode on, and they are currently functioning as very functional furniture.
Gretchen: But is a floor furniture? Because you can use a floor as a table.
[Music]
Lauren: I totally forgot that we used to run polls on Patreon a whole heap.
Gretchen: Now, we have the Patreon Discord, so that’s where that type of stuff happens.
Lauren: It didn’t exist for at least two years after this episode went up.
Gretchen: We launched the Patreon Discord in January 2020, which turned out to be a rather well-timed decision because people were at home and online a lot more.
Lauren: I was incredibly sceptical before we set it up, and it’s turned into such a lovely space – not just for us to run occasional food semantics polls but a place for Lingthusiasm fans to hang out and chat.
Gretchen: If you want to, you can run your own food semantics polls on the Discord or chat about other linguistics-y and non-linguistics-y things. Anything else you noticed about revising this episode, Lauren?
Lauren: I forgot we talked about Canadian Tire, a retail outlet that is still completely mystifying to me although, to be clear, the Canadian part is actually very clear.
Gretchen: [Laughs] I also love that I was mysteriously referring to “the book.”
Lauren: Oh, yes, “the book.”
Gretchen: At the time, I was very much actively writing Because Internet. It had Because Internet as a working title from the very beginning, but we were still not sure if we were going to change it.
Lauren: I forgot about that. It seems so obvious now, but it was really not – it was just a working title.
Gretchen: We went through a whole couple months of trying to come up with a better title. In the end, nothing was better.
Lauren: How funny. It was just cryptically “the book” for a very long time.
Gretchen: For a very long time. I don’t even remember any of those old candidate titles because all of them were just rejected instantly.
Lauren: I also think this bonus does something that ended up becoming a really important and recurring theme for Lingthusiasm which is that having some knowledge of how language actually works can actually be really beneficial for your general well-being and your levels of anxiety. I still love picking these kind of semantic prototype fights but purely from a like, “This is a fun game” and not that there’s anything at stake.
Gretchen: When we put this episode up for the first time as a bonus, someone wrote a reply that I’m still thinking about years later which is that it made them feel better about not really knowing what it means to “feel like a woman” or what a definition of “womanhood” would look like because it turns out that we have an equally hard time coming up with an exact definition of what a “sandwich” is or a “bird” or a “cup” or basically any common word.
Lauren: But if we approach these common words through prototype theory, we can point to a bunch of examples of “Here are a lot of different women. How do I relate to ‘woman’ in the context of this broader possibility space?”
Gretchen: Right. There doesn’t have to be an exact criteria that all women can fly and have four legs and all these specific features.
Lauren: Um, I think you’re talking about a Pegasus.
Gretchen: I’m open minded.
Lauren: But yes, prototype theory is a way of holding together our understanding of the world that doesn’t just have really restrictive definitional criteria.
Gretchen: I think it’s an interesting reflection that dictionaries have this tendency – you know, when I was a kid, and I asked the meaning of the word, sometimes my parents would be like, “Well, why don’t we look that up in the dictionary?” which have captured our imagination for how words quote-unquote “work” when they don’t seem to correspond to the psychological reality of how we learn most words apart from their technical words.
Lauren: Yeah, I think prototype theory really helps us remember that a dictionary definition is a post hoc, end result creation of people and not the way that meaning is necessarily arranged in our minds.
Gretchen: It’s an attempt to describe the outcome of being exposed to a bunch of prototypes. But the way we learn most words is by being exposed to, okay, this is a dog, and this is a dog, and this is a dog, and this is a dog, and then having this fuzzy generalisation based on all these examples.
Lauren: It’s nice that eight years after recording this episode, we finally understood what the lesson we were trying to impart in this episode was.
Gretchen: I feel also very concretely the prototype theory has helped me feel more relaxed about learning words in other languages that don’t necessarily have an exact correspondence to words that I’m already familiar with in English.
Lauren: You could actually just figure out what a word is from some examples being given to you, and that is how your brain usually works anyway.
Gretchen: Right. If you take something like “big” and “large,” and you’re trying to explain to people who don’t have English as a first language what’s the difference between these two, it’s not really a difference in meaning, but there’re certain contexts in which “big” is just the word that’s used or in which “large” is just the word that’s used. We don’t go around talking about “the large bang,” we talk about “the big bang.”
Lauren: It’s not that “big” or “large” are necessarily more bigger or larger than either of the other one.
Gretchen: I was recently trying to learn the meaning of a word in French which is “moelleux.”
Lauren: Okay, that’s gonna be spelt with a whole bunch of letters that aren’t –
Gretchen: It’s got some silent letters in it – M-O-E-L-L-E-U-X if you wanna know. “Moelleux.”
Lauren: There you go.
Gretchen: And I was like, “Is it like ‘molle,’ which is ‘soft’,” and it was like, “Kind of.” But ultimately, the way that I have an understanding of this word is to think about what kinds of objects can it describe. A wine can be “moelleux.”
Lauren: Because of its texture or its taste?
Gretchen: The translation I’m getting online is that a wine can be “mellow.”
Lauren: Okay, yeah, that is an adjective I’ve heard used for wine before.
Gretchen: But also, whipped cream is probably “moelleux,” which does not feel like it really has much in common with wine to me – or like sea foam, or a pillow can be “moelleux.” Not all pillows, but a really fluffy pillow is “moelleux.”
Lauren: Soft and fluffy and foamy.
Gretchen: And maybe a bit spongey because “moelle” is originally the marrow of a bone – so the inside of the bone is sponge-y.
Lauren: I feel like spongey and – “soft” and “fluffy” exist in an overlapping prototype space. There’re things that can be both of those things in my English speaker brain. And then “spongey” is far enough away from “soft” and “fluffy” to have its own prototype centre. But in French, there’re things that all come towards that as a single point. How interesting.
Gretchen: Right. The same thing with something like “mellow,” which now that I’m looking at it, maybe “mellow” has a relationship with “moelleux” because they’re spelled quite similarly.
Lauren: Okay, let’s look that up. As always, my brain is just like, “I’m intrigued. Let’s check.”
Gretchen: Oh, wow, okay, no connection at all.
Lauren: There we go.
Gretchen: “Mellow” comes from an Old English word meaning “soft,” “tender,” and was especially originally meaning “soft, sweet, and juicy as a ripe fruit.” A little bit of that softness but much more in this fruit juice sense.
Lauren: Not in the spongey marrow sense.
Gretchen: Not from French at all. Always look up your etymologies! Coming up with going through and naming, okay, “Can this food be ‘moelleux’? Can this thing be ‘moelleux’? This doesn’t have to be a food” gave me a much better sense of the conceptual space than trying to translate it to an English word that just wouldn’t totally map onto it.
Lauren: Again, a part of why you can’t have elegant, easy translation across languages because languages are operating in different semantic spaces and have things that are prototypes in one language that don’t quite fit other languages.
Gretchen: I think that relaxing our sense that every word must have a definition – and then sometimes when you actually got a dictionary, there’s like, okay, there’s 17 different things, and you can feel that they’re related in a conceptual way, but the way that the lexicographer is trying to capture that is by writing out 17 definitions or contexts in which you can use “moelleux.” But the way that humans actually acquire those isn’t by memorising 17 different definitions. It’s by learning all of the contexts in which a word is used and the prototypes that it’s attached to.
Lauren: I have to say this is one of the bonus episodes where I talk about it and forget that it’s been a bonus episode.
Gretchen: I try to send this bonus to people all the time, and then I’m like, “Ah, no, wait, you’ve got to become a patron.” This is why we’ve made this one available because we keep sending people to it. Please enjoy your newfound use of prototype theory. Tell us about other prototype theory – long discussions that you’ve had that we didn’t get to in this episode because almost any word, if you look at it long enough, you can start having prototype theory discussions around it, which is the fun part.
[Music]
Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or on lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode at lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like scarves and t-shirts with a leaping rabbit and the word “Gavagai” written on them, “Ask me about linguistics” stickers, and aesthetic IPA charts – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.
Lauren: My social media and blog are Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just want to help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include linguistic landscapes, an episode full of linguistics advice, and an entire episode on the linguistics of kissing. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.
Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.
Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
English is absolutely unique: it has the super-smart word sibling, which means ‘brother or sister’, regardless of gender. We do not have anything that useful in our language.
Tim Parks, Italian life:
He considered Verga’s story Black Bread. «I fratelli», the third paragraph begins, «che erano come le dita della stessa mano finché viveva il padre, ora dovevano pensare ciascuno ai casi propri».
How difficult that was to translate! I fratelli, the brothers, but it actually includes the sisters too — the brothers and sisters. Italian has one word for both, a familiar, intimate word, quite different from the dry, technical sibling.
