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Transcript Episode 117: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking - Interview with Julie Sedivy

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking - Interview with Julie Sedivy’. 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]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the science of beautiful writing with Dr. Julie Sedivy, who’s a psycholinguist based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and the author of Memory Speaks and Linguaphile.

Lauren: But first, this episode originally aired on Patreon a year and a half ago. We heard from so many listeners who wanted to share it with their writing groups or with academics trying to make the transition from scientific writing to literary writing. We thought we’d make it available to everyone as part of our annual unlocking of a bonus episode in the main feed.

Gretchen: Which also gives us and everyone on the production team a mini break that keeps making the show sustainable for us.

Lauren: If you’d like to listen to over 100 other more Lingthusiasm episodes that are bonuses like this one, and maybe you’d like to suggest which one we should unlock next year, join us on Patreon.

Gretchen: We’ve also been posting more and more titbits for everyone who follows us on Patreon – both free and paid – including unlocking our very first bonus episode about swearing with added swear-y commentary.

Lauren: We’ve recently unlocked a bonus chat with Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist about linguistics podcasting.

Gretchen: Or if you’re someone who’s always got a lot of podcasts on the back burner and doesn’t really need more listening material, but you’d just like to help us keep existing long into the future, there’s a new option on Patreon where you can purchase a community gift membership for us to give out to one of your fellow lingthusiasts who’d like to listen to the bonus episodes and can’t afford it right now.

Lauren: We’ve already given out seven of these community-gifted memberships thanks to the generosity of few people who found this feature before we had even figured out what we were doing with it.

Gretchen: If anyone else is inclined to join them, I think that was really a post that resonated in this economy. It helps us keep going at the same time.

Lauren: Stay subscribed to emails from Lingthusiasm on Patreon to hear about any future community gift memberships that become available.

Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for memberships for yourself, for a specific person you know, or for these new community gift memberships.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Julie.

Julie: Hi, Gretchen. I am fulfilling a longtime fantasy of appearing on Lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: It’s so fun to have you since you’re already a listener.

Julie: Indeed.

Gretchen: Before we get into stuff about your book, Linguaphile, and your other book, Memory Speaks, let’s start with a question that we ask all of our guests, which is, “How did you get into linguistics?”

Julie: I stumbled into it. I had started university as an English major. I had always thought that I would be a writer from the time I was very small. I was reading through course descriptions, came across this thing called “linguistics,” and it made reference to “grammar” and other stuff that didn’t sound overly interesting to me, but I thought, “If I’m gonna be a writer, I probably need to know some of this stuff.” I took the class, and from the get-go, I was utterly mesmerised. I think my experience was a little bit like – imagine you’re a kid, and you love bugs. You’ve spent your life watching bugs and being fascinated by them, but you don’t realise you can be a scientist of bugs and that there is a science of bugs. Then suddenly you encounter this, you know, at the age of 18. That’s a little bit what it was like for me just to realise that you can study this scientifically, systematically. Of course, one of the things that comes out when you start looking at linguistics is the realisation that there’s so much about language that’s going on below the surface of conscious awareness that is not really easy to just introspect about unless you have the right tools.

Gretchen: You’d had a lot of language experiences before discovering linguistics as a named phenomenon.

Julie: I did. And I think that’s what gave me an orientation and an attunement to language and a desire to use it as a medium as a writer. I was lucky enough to have been dragged from one linguistic environment to another. I think my parents would probably not frame it that way. It was quite a difficult time for them to be bouncing around from one country to another. I was born in what was then Czechoslovakia, and then we lived in Austria for a while, and Italy, and back and forth a bit, and then finally landed in Montreal where I learned French as my fourth language. Finally, English as a fifth language in kindergarten for the first time.

Gretchen: Wow. I really enjoyed the Montreal aspects of your writing because I also live in Montreal. Hearing some of the things that were, like, before I lived here, before I was around in here, and the way that English and French interplay in that – and in your childhood brain.

Julie: Yeah, no, it was a real lesson to me in observing some of the sociolinguistic aspects of language because it was very clear at the time – so this would’ve been the early-to-mid ’70s when we first arrived – that French – I mean, it was the language spoken by the majority, but it was not the language of official business, and it was not the respected language.

Gretchen: Not the language of power in some ways.

Julie: Not the language of power. At the time that we arrived in Canada, immigrants still had the choice in Quebec to send their kids to English school or French school. Almost everybody sent their kids to English school because that was the language that would give you the greatest opportunities. And then the language laws came into effect very soon after we arrived.

Gretchen: These are the Quebec language laws that say, first of all, if you’re an immigrant to Canada, if neither of your parents was educated in English in Canada (this very specific codicil for the English minority in Quebec), then you have to be sent to French school because the idea that is French is and should be the language of Quebec, and that there’s something to be defended there.

Julie: Exactly. My family (my siblings and I) were educated in English. I did one year of school in French just because I hated the English school I was in, so I just decided, “Oh, let’s see if the French school is any better,” and it was. That was a wonderful experience. But for the most part French, for me, was the language that I spoke with friends. It was a social language. It was a fun language. I still sink into it as the language where I just relax. It’s sort of like kicking off your shoes, putting on your pyjamas, that is Quebec French for me.

Gretchen: I noticed – we were at a café before this – and you were talking to people in French in the café, like, totally switching back and forth between the two, as I also do, and as a lot of people in Montreal do, even though you don’t live in Montreal anymore.

Julie: Well, to me, being in Montreal is the opportunity to speak French and to experience the pleasure of speaking French. I really do just almost get a bodily sensation of “Ah” when I get to speak French. I use it wherever possible, even when they speak English back to me because they detect that that’s not my strongest language. I really push back and wanna continue in French.

Gretchen: So, you took an intro linguistics course, fell in love, and decided to become a linguistics professor. It’s that easy, right? [Laughs]

Julie: Not on the spot. It was more like a seduction, I think, into linguistics.

Gretchen: Linguistics had to buy you dinner first. [Laughter]

Julie: It very quickly bought me dinner and then some. It was a pretty short courtship. I did switch my major rather quickly, I think, after that first linguistics course. Certainly, by my second or third year, I had the feeling that this was something I was continue in, and go to grad school, and wanna study.

Gretchen: How did your particular area of linguistics court you?

Julie: Oh, yes, so psycholinguistics is what drew me. You know, it’s so interesting to me to think of psycholinguistics as a sub-branch of linguistics because, in many ways, I think of all linguistics as being part of what we’re doing in our minds with language, of course, but the specific sub-field of psycholinguistics tends to be very experimental in its approach. It’s the process of designing studies to investigate: how is it that we learn language; how is it that we produce language; how do we understand it? I think what drew me is that that was the area where you could see language in action in real time. That, I think, is very interesting to me because it lays bare some of the vulnerabilities of language. A lot of how we determine how we process language psychologically is by looking at “Where does it fail? Where does it fall apart?” and that gives us a sense of “What memory limitations are we working with? What are some of the computational things that are going on in our minds as we process language?” By looking at the points where, if we stress language, where can it break a little bit?

Gretchen: Do you have an example of one of those types of failures you try to get people to do in the lab?

Julie: Sure. At the time, there was a lot of focus on the problem of ambiguity. One thing that you learn very quickly when you look at language in real time is that we can only experience language in small slices of time. Acoustically, the sentence unfolds, and what has been produced a moment ago is gone, and you can only recover it through memory. You’re trying to constantly keep in memory the parts that are no longer present in time, trying to anticipate what’s coming. In a sense, you’re playing this game between memory and anticipation and prediction. What that means is that there’s tremendous room for ambiguity that is temporary. It will get resolved. But even at the level of a syllable – so if I say the syllable “can,” well, that can continue as “cantankerous,” “candle,” “Canada,” “cancer,” any one of many, many words. It turns out that people are very quickly trying to predict or make guesses as to what is unfolding at that moment.

Gretchen: If you bring people into a lab, you have them look at a little computer screen, or maybe they’re doing some sort of eye-tracking, so you can see what they’re looking at, or you can put a little brainwave cap on their head, so you can try to see which areas of their brain are producing more electricity, which is thoughts, and then you play them “CANdle” or “CANdy” or “CANada,” and you have pictures of a Canadian flag and a candle and a candy or something on the screen, and then you can see where they’re looking and what they’re thinking when they’re doing that.

Julie: Exactly. Eye-tracking is a really elegant method to study that. It gives us a sense of how people are projecting sound onto meaning very quickly. Another way that ambiguity rears its – I’m not gonna say “ugly” head because I think it’s a rather interesting head.

Gretchen: I think ambiguity is very beautiful. It’s so cool that things can mean so many different things, and yet, we mostly do understand each other.

Julie: Exactly. That’s what I found absolutely riveting. You also see it at the level of sentences. If you can have a sentence like, “John saw the man with…,” and it can continue as “with the blue coat,” or “John saw the man with binoculars.” Those are two very different structures underlying that first part of the sentence. You don’t necessarily know how that’s gonna continue. These kinds of sentences we call very poetically “garden path sentences” because you might think that they’re proceeding in one direction, and then suddenly you’re yanked off the path that you’re on, and you realise, “Whoops, that hit a wall, and now I have to retrace another line.” That can also give us a lot of information about “What information are people taking in? What are they considering from context? What are they basing their predictions and expectations on?” and from that, develop very intricate models of how language comprehension works.

Gretchen: You can bring people into the lab and give them a sentence like – one of the classics I always love for garden path sentences is “The horse raced past the barn fell,” which you go, okay, “The horse raced past the barn,” that’s a normal sentence, and then, what’s this “fell” doing? You have to go back and retrace your steps and go, “Oh, it’s the horse who was raced” or “that was raced past the barn,” that horse fell. You can, again, do eye tracking and see where do people’s eyes jump back to the earlier portion of a sentence to say, “Oh, I’m reinterpreting this now.”

Julie: That’s right. Or you can just see “How long are people spending time reading a surprising continuation of a sentence?”

Gretchen: Versus an expected one.

Julie: Versus an expected one, exactly. Then you can tweak aspects of the context and see, “Now, can we make the same sentence less surprising if we set up a particular context, or we fiddle with the verb of the sentence?” These are some of the ways that we have used to build our theories.

Gretchen: So, you were doing psycholinguistics. You were a professor at Brown University in the US. And then now you’re a writer. How did that come about?

Julie: Well, yeah, so I guess that ambition of being a writer never fully left me. It was a little bit sidelined or supressed. You know, I always had the thought that after I got tenure, I would then be able to write other books – not necessarily the books that you write as a researcher. Well, that’s delusional – at least it was for me. Maybe there’re people who can do that, but I’m someone who works quite slowly in both of those streams. I take a lot of time to think about experiments and design them. I also take a very long time to think about books and write them. For me, it was just not something I could do in parallel.

Gretchen: There’s a lot of stuff like, you know, marking papers and doing all of that administrative work of being a professor, which is a lot to do.

Julie: And running a lab is like running a small business. If you have a full-time lab manager, as I did, then all of a sudden people’s livelihoods depend on you getting the next grant. There’s that kind of pressure and sense of responsibility. I just felt that I could not, in good conscience, come in and out of that lab work if I decided I wanted to flit off for a couple of years and write a book. You have graduate students to whom you’re responsible as well. It came down to a choice. The tipping point was going on sabbatical for a year and realising that, hmm, there was still this draw of wanting to write and sort of prompted a whole re-evaluation of my life. I started gradually transforming myself into the kind of writer that could write the books that I wanted to.

Gretchen: How did you take that first step out to writing things beyond textbooks or research monographs?

Julie: What happened is that on sabbatical I was working on a book that I was co-writing with Greg Carlson on language and advertising. This came out of a class that we had jointly developed when I was a graduate student at the University of Rochester. We decided we would write this up as a book for a general audience. That just put me into the pleasure of writing. It was a little bit of a gateway book for me. The book is now quite dated.

Gretchen: This was Sold On Language.

Julie: This is Sold On Language. It also revealed to me that I still had a long way to go to build up the kinds of skills that I wanted to have as a really serious writer.

Gretchen: How did you go about building up that skill?

Julie: Writing short pieces for various magazines and outlets. Writing a lot of unpublished poetry, actually. Because that put me in a very different skillset, being very attuned to language sound, language structure, a different process of working with language that also tapped into something a little bit more intuitive, yeah, that was really focused on the aesthetics of language. That was very important to me as a writer.

Gretchen: One of the things that I noticed about your first book that I read, which was Memory Speaks, which is a book that we talked about in an earlier episode about language policy, which we’ll link to, was that your writing was very beautiful. I’m really interested to hear that you had this step of like, “I’m gonna go away and write a whole bunch of poetry to develop that aesthetic sense of language in addition to the linguistic analytical sense.”

Julie: Exactly. Scientific writing trains you in a particular style that serves the purpose of scientific writing, but it is different from literary writing. Literary writing values very highly a feeling of embodiment, a subjective point of view, where scientific writing tends to shy away from that, tends toward abstraction. As scientists, we are trained to be very abstract thinkers. I think we forget how bizarre that is as a way of moving through the world and using language. I had to learn to disengage from that and learn the skillset of writers who are more grounded in experience, in observation, in detail. I think a big part of my process was to also negotiate between the two because my writing does deal with scientific subjects as well. There are sometimes good reasons why you wanna be sceptical of a literary style of writing to get certain points across.

Gretchen: This is one of the things that I notice about both of the books of yours that I’ve read – Memory Speaks and, the new one, Linguaphile – is that you have this genre of writing that’s partially memoir, where it’s personal experience, and then also partially scientific where it’s like, “Oh, and here’s this study,” but the studies feel very well integrated into the personal experience, and the personal experience very well integrated into the studies. There’s this back and forth that I’m never getting whiplash between the two.

Julie: I’m so happy to hear you say that because it took me a long time to figure out. When I first started trying to fuse those things together, it felt a little bit like I was creating a Frankenstein thing where if I launched into describing a study, I would just slip into that more scientific style of language. Creating a piece so that the seams didn’t show as much was definitely part of the process for me.

Gretchen: This is also one of the things that I grappled with when I was writing Because Internet where because I was writing about a genre of language, informal writing, that’s often denigrated, I wanted to show, rather than just tell, that it can still be beautiful. It can still be creative and expressive and really interesting and engaging. That meant that my writing had to be beautiful if I was gonna write in something approaching that style.

Julie: Yes. And energetic. That is one of the things that Because Internet has, I think, so well is that energy and spontaneity that comes through in the language that you’re writing about.

Gretchen: Which is something that I wrote ten drafts of to sound this spontaneous, you know?

Julie: I know. I know. [Laughter]

Gretchen: The writing process aspect – and when I was reading Linguaphile, which is the new book that you wrote, about language throughout the lifespan, both language and childhood and adulthood and old age and loss and things like that, I noticed that I was very like – the chapters were just running very smoothly through my fingers, through my eyes, and I was just propelled on to continue reading it and didn’t feel like I was getting bogged down or dragged back at any point, which is one of the things that’s very tricky both in memoir because the individual details of one person’s life –

Julie: Can be boring. [Laughter]

Gretchen: I wanna say it diplomatically, but like, it’s really easy to write something that is of interest to you and your friends and family and not super interesting to people who don’t know you because that’s a fail state of memoir. And then the fail state of scientific writing is, okay, here’s a whole bunch of details of jargon or too many studies or this type of thing and trying to take this bird’s eye view of what’s interesting about both of these topics that are sometimes hard to write about in an interesting way.

Julie: Exactly. In a way, I think, fusing the two helped me avoid the pitfalls of each one a little bit because the choices about what details to include from the memoir side are driven by “How do they fit in with the themes I wanted to explore from the psycholinguistic side?” The process of writing Linguaphile was quite unusual for me. It was a little bit different from other work. I basically started with I think 12 chapters in each one. I just conceived of as, at the beginning, a bucket that I would start with some psycholinguistic concept that began with early infancy and went through the lifespan. The first chapter, for instance, deals with infant speech perception – how do infants begin to break into this river of sound and pull out some of the patterns of sound and identify where word boundaries are? That was the starting concept, and then that constrains what I choose from the memoir side, so that you’re not just rambling on into the things that are fun for you to remember but may be not useful for the literary project you’re undertaking.

Gretchen: I felt very held by the book in terms of what it was doing. I also found that, at a more granular level, your writing’s very beautiful. I wanted to ask you about that. As a linguist, what does “beauty” in writing or in language look like for you?

Julie: I feel that it just really enriches my experience of it. I wanna tell you what happened to me one time when I was a young professor teaching linguistics. I had a student come up to me after class and say, “Thanks for this lecture, but I will be dropping the class because I’m a poet,” she said, “and I’m not interested in dissecting language this way.” That was all that she said. I was really taken aback because, for me, that had not been my experience that somehow it diminished my sense of creativity with the language or appreciation for its beauty. If anything, it enhanced it. Once you know how intricate language is from the inside, I feel that you are just more attuned to things like the mouth-feel of words. You’ve studied how they’re shaped in the articulatory tract. You have a sense of which sounds the mind clumps together as being more similar than others. This is very useful material for a poet, I think, to have that understanding of the sound space and which sounds are more distant than others. Understanding how sentences are put together gave me a sense of how you can create patterns and then create a sense of surprise, a little twist, or create balanced sentences.

Gretchen: I’m thinking about an artist, a sculpture, a Michelangelo-type sculptor, studying human anatomy because if you know the way the muscles are arranged below the skin, you can create these incredibly human, life-like sculptures or drawings or sketches or things like that because you’ve actually examined, from life, in this more detailed way, whereas if you’re saying, “Oh, I can only do things from an impressionistic perspective, and knowing the names of the muscles or knowing how they’re arranged in this particular way, that spoils it because I’ve attacked it too scientifically,” I mean, obviously, I agree with you because I’m also a linguist that having this more detailed understanding of what things are similar to other things or what things are different from other things means that you’re able to manipulate those things more precisely or be aware of why something is or isn’t working in the aesthetic sense you’re aiming for.

Julie: Absolutely. And it also extends your toolkit. One of the things that you come across if you’re studying syntax, for instance, you come across a lot of really unusual constructions because your job as a linguist is to explain, “Hm, why can we say X, and we can’t say Y?” That just gives you an awareness of the range of structures that are out there in language, whereas, day-to-day, we tend to use a much narrower set in our regular lives. I also am struck by how visual artists often study the visual perception system. They’ll study how colour perception works or how perception of perspective works and use that as something that informs their work. Understanding how garden path sentences work allows you to avoid clunky sentences that might derail the reader in ways that are not pleasant, that create a sense of “Wait, what?” – a disorienting feeling that is not nice, that’s not achieving anything that you wanna achieve as a writer.

Gretchen: I find that one of the things that I often end up doing when I’m revising a text or when I’m editing someone else’s text is saying, okay, so you’ve listed three things here. You’ve said, “This is this. This is this. And this is something else.” The things that you’ve listed, one of them is a noun, one of them is a verb, and one of them is something else – a prepositional phrase or something like this. It would be easier for the reader if we listed three nouns or three verbs or three prepositional phrases or three things that were more syntactically similar to each other because then we can keep the same syntax, keep the same grammatical construction the whole way through. You don’t notice necessarily, impressionistically, when you’re reading something. You’re like, “Ah, good, this person has listed three nouns in parallel, and that’s what makes this easy to read.” But you notice the absence of it, and you’re like, “Ooo, this – eh, I don’t quite know what’s going on this sentence. It’s kind of clunky. It’s slowing me down in a way that I don’t understand,” which, to go back to doing eye tracking studies and saying, “Okay, when do people back track? When do people slow down? What makes them slow down?” Oh, I can actually have an answer to that.

Julie: Exactly. In fact, often, when I am editing my work or someone else’s work, I have an intuitive sense of exactly what the eye is likely to be doing in that particular sentence because I’ve conducted a number of experiments.

Gretchen: Have you ever done any eye tracking studies on your own works, or are these two different areas of your life?

Julie: These are two different areas. I do not have a portable eye tracker in my home.

Gretchen: They’re pretty expensive.

Julie: To get accuracy by the character – well, you know, actually, there might be simple programmes that you could – you know what? I’m gonna – now that you mention this, I’m gonna actually look to see whether those tools are cheap enough to advocate for use for writers. It would be so cool to use that in a writing workshop and to demonstrate to people, “Here is your original sentence. And here is what the eye is doing. And, oops, here’s a little wrinkle.”

Gretchen: “Here’s the part where the reader got slowed down or back tracked or didn’t quite know what was” – and maybe, in some cases, you want to create the effect of the reader slowing down or back tracking or something if you’re trying to make them have a particular type of experience. Anything is good or bad depending on what your goals are in that context.

Julie: You can also see if people are spending a bit of time at the end of a sentence, absorbing it. That’s often a signal of some complexity happening. Sometimes you want that complexity. You want to mark a sentence as being weighty or important in some way. Actually, this is my new thing. I am now going to do eye tracking for writers and editors.

Gretchen: Because, like, smartphone cameras are pretty cheap these days. Maybe you could hook this up to your phone and just do this. So, we’ve talked about stuff being easy to follow or not at the level of the sentence, but there’s also a level of beauty at the word level or word choice level. I find that one of the things that I have found helpful with my linguistics training is that I often have a sense for many words – not necessarily like, “Ooo, linguistics taught me all of the etymologies,” because, sadly, that is a misconception, but I do often have a sense for a word of whether it’s more likely to be Germanic or Latinate. When I’m trying to make a sentence less convoluted, less overwhelming to process, I can say, “Oh, this sentence has a lot of Latinate vocabulary in it. Maybe if I made some of these words more Germanic, it would be easier for people to understand. Or if I’m trying to make something sound more sophisticated, I can say, “Oh, I’m using a lot of Germanic words, what if I use some more Latinate ones here? And then it might sound more abstract or more fancy or more complicated – more sophisticated.”

Julie: One side effect of that, too, is that then you’re launching into a different phonology, right, so that the Latinate words are often less clustering of consonants, often more syllables involved.

Gretchen: More vowels in relation to the consonants, this type of thing. But you also pointed to, in Linguaphile, specific sound trends that make some words sound more or less beautiful at a general aesthetic level. I think we could do a little experiment perhaps where you can read me some words and let me see which ones I think are more beautiful. And then anyone listening to this episode can see whether your impressions of the aesthetics of them agree or disagree with mine.

Julie: All right, Gretchen, let’s see what you think of these words. I’m gonna read the list, and then you tell me which one is the most beautiful to start. “Luggage, liminal, withstand, tremulous, pulchritude, zoo.”

Gretchen: “Zoo” as in “zoological gardens”?

Julie: Yes, that one. “Zoo.”

Gretchen: Okay, so we have “luggage, liminal, withstand, tremulous” –

Julie: “Pulchritude.”

Gretchen: “Pulchritude” and “zoo.” I’m feeling like “liminal” and “tremulous” are really towards the top of my list. “Luggage” and “pulchritude” – it’s sort of ironic because “pulchritude” means “beauty,” but it’s such a hideous word. Like, oh man.

Julie: That’s why nobody uses it anymore. There’s this clash of meaning and sound, I think.

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s very obscure. Like, it’s satisfying to know, but it’s terrible. Then the middle two are – what am I left with? – “zoo” and –

Julie: “Withstand.”

Gretchen: “Withstand.” Yeah, those are towards the middle. Between “liminal” and “tremulous,” I would say slight edge towards “tremulous” I think. “Tremulous” above “liminal.” Between “zoo” and “withstand,” hmm, they both are sort of middling words. I think maybe I’m gonna go with “zoo.” And then between “luggage” and “pulchritude,” they’re both real clunky words. I think “luggage” is slightly less terrible, less hideous, than “pulchritude.”

Julie: And notice that “clunky” is a clunky-sounding word.

Gretchen: From a sound level – from a phonetic level – “pulchritude” and “luggage” and “clunky,” they all have /k/s and /g/s in them.

Julie: Yeah, and that back consonant /ʌ/.

Gretchen: And that /ʌ/ vowel.

Julie: Which we get in “ugly” and “muck” and lots of words that are really unpleasant.

Gretchen: /ʌ/ /ʌ/ /ʌ/ /ʌ/ /ʌ/. Okay.

Julie: Ugh.

Gretchen: Ugh. All right. So, there’s a vowel-consonant thing. I also feel like the uglier words maybe had more consonants in them.

Julie: Yeah, they tend to bunch up the consonants, which is not really great for my native language because Czech is well known for piling consonants together.

Gretchen: Yeah. I mean, I think in the context of a language as a whole, how ubiquitous do we think these aesthetic judgements are?

Julie: You know, there’s really not that much study of them. I think it’s a relatively new area of study. There’re definitely some patterns that seem to hold across languages, some sounds that seem to evoke similar concepts across languages. The /i/ vowel is associated with delicate things, light things –

Gretchen: Small things.

Julie: Small things – exactly. Whereas the /oʊ/ and /ʌ/ sounds tend to evoke some heft.

Gretchen: Larger things. And so, if we think that small things are cute, then maybe there’s an association there. And then I had “liminal” and “tremulous,” which both seem very beautiful. What do we have there?

Julie: The L and M sounds are known to be pleasing, which may explain a little bit the title of my book, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love.

Gretchen: The “Live, Laugh, Love” of language books, unfortunately, perhaps.

Julie: Perhaps. I guess it’s not accidental that those make their way into titles – among other reasons, of course. But it is a little bit of a puzzle as to why these judgements of beauty seem to be somewhat stable. We don’t really have a good sense of why that is or what function that’s serving.

Gretchen: To be fair, L, M, you know, some sort of /k/ /g/ sound, like – /oʊ/ – these are all very common in basically every language. These are all very common sounds that are found in a lot of places.

Julie: But they’re not necessarily THE most common sounds.

Gretchen: There is, to some degree, that language aesthetic judgements are also very much wrapped up in our judgements of who’s the type of person who speaks that language. A lot of the stereotypes that English speakers have about German as a language feel like they’re leftover World War II propaganda to me. Because English speakers don’t think the same things about Dutch or French, which have many of the same sounds.

Julie: That’s right. In fact, to me, German is a very beautiful language. I guess I have very early associations. It was one of the earliest languages I was exposed to. I find it quite lovely. I never understood what people were talking about when they described as “guttural” and “full of abruptness and ugliness.” I think it’s a very mellifluous language.

Gretchen: I think it is as well. For me, languages that have a lot of sounds that are produced without the vocal folds vibrating – voiceless sounds like T and K as compared to voiced sounds like /b/ and /m/ and /g/ have a certain lightness to them that’s reflected in voicing versus not voicing. German has these devoiced consonants at the end of words that make it sound very light to me.

Julie: That’s a good observation.

Gretchen: I had this observation between Finnish and Estonian. Finnish has a lot more voiceless consonants than Estonian does. Otherwise, they’re very related. I had this aesthetic sense that Finnish felt lighter to me than Estonian. I don’t understand either of those languages, but I was visiting those countries, and I had this interesting aesthetic judgment that you get about languages you don’t understand.

Julie: That’s interesting. One place where there have been some studies that look at the links between sounds and feelings or meanings is in studies of brand names. You make up a word for a product, and you say, “Which sounds lighter: ‘zive’ or ‘sive’?”, these kinds of binary distinctions. Turns out that people do have some judgments that they make about lightness, weight, speed, as well. You would name a sports car with a fricative and maybe an SUV vehicle with a plosive.

Gretchen: And then it seems faster or slower or larger, more impressive. One of the things I think about a lot when it comes to writing advice is that a lot of times when you read books about like, “Here’s how to write,” from someone who’s a famous writer, but doesn’t have any training in analysing language, they’ll give advice that they then contradict themselves. You see writing advice books saying things like, “Avoid the passive,” and then in the very next sentence, they’ll use a passive. There’s a temptation to maybe say, “Okay, well, there’s no point in writing advice at all.” People should just read a lot and absorb whatever they can and do it all at this sort of “Well, don’t think about it too hard” level – just consume a bunch of aesthetically pleasing language, whatever that means to you, and then you’ll naturally produce it. As linguists, I find that a little bit unsatisfying because, surely, we can actually analyse language, and we can actually analyse, okay, what’s going on in this sentence that makes people feel bored or makes people feel excited or interested. How can you balance this?

Julie: I think there’s a whole industry waiting to launch that is basically trained linguists who are also writers who can put those things together. I think a lot of traditional writing advice really reflects either folk wisdom about writing that people have absorbed that they don’t necessarily follow or the aesthetic preferences of the writer themselves, which, you know, okay, that’s fine, that’s one style of writing, but it’s not necessarily the only way to write effectively or beautifully. But for sure, I would give writers advice along the lines of “Use syntax that doesn’t unpleasantly or without purpose create processing difficulty or a processing hitch.” If you’re gonna introduce complexity into the sentence, it should be doing some work for you, so either creating a delightful surprise or detour from expectation that is pleasant as opposed to unpleasant or maybe shifting the focus of intention on a particular portion of the sentence. For example, the passive is wonderful for this. You use it as a device for putting forward into that spotlight of the sentence the thing that you want someone to focus on.

Gretchen: If we say, as an example of the passive, I could say, “I interviewed Julie Sedivy on Lingthusiasm,” and then in the passive, it would be, “Julie Sedivy was interviewed on Lingthusiasm.” Maybe I’m not even in this sentence. Or maybe I’m backgrounded. Depending on who is the focus of the conversation, who’s writing the post on social media, I might say, “I interviewed you,” but you might say, “I was interviewed,” depending on who we wanna – we wanna focus on ourselves or what we’re trying to highlight in the rest of the paragraph or something like that. It can be a very effective way of keeping the topic consistent across every sentence.

Julie: Exactly. And then there are manipulations of the sentence that you can use to really create unusual structures that do really wonderfully interesting things. One sentence that comes to mind – I’m not gonna remember the author of the sentence, but I love the sentence. The sentence is “‘Vermin,’ he called his critics.” That has a very different feel than “He called his critics ‘vermin’.”

Gretchen: It’s getting your attention. It’s a slightly more unusual structure. As you said, it’s not as common to say, like, “vermin,” and then you don’t know what’s happening after that.

Julie: Yeah. That’s an example of complexity that’s doing some clear work that is goal-directed. That’s one piece of advice. Along with that just comes lots of exposure to different structures that you might use and a sense of awareness of what is useful complexity, what’s not useful complexity. I think you could teach a whole segment of a course on that concept alone.

Gretchen: One of the other things that I’ve found has been useful from my linguistics training is when – especially when writing is a negotiation. Edited is a negotiation between you and sometimes multiple editors or proofreaders – people who are trying to help you make the writing the most of what it can be. To be able to communicate about the things that are in the sentences, it’s helpful to know the names for them. Even though you can write very intuitively without knowing what the names for things are, when you want to then communicate with someone else about that, it’s helpful to have this shared vocabulary. I’ve had some really fantastic editing experiences with helping to refine, okay, I don’t think you’re actually making this point as clearly as you want to be type of things, but also sometimes where an editor will say, “Okay, I think this is correct” or “This is not correct, here.” My linguistics training gives me the confidence to push back against that sometimes and say, “Well, if I was doing it this way, I would be trying to create this effect. If I was doing it this way, I’d be trying to create that effect, and so I think the comma needs to stay because I’m trying to do this particular thing,” rather than saying like, “Oh, well, you must know better, therefore, I need to immediately say yes to whatever edits someone else is making.

Julie: Exactly. And that’s a reflection of the fact that many editors – most – the vast majority of editors do not have training in linguistics. Again, a regrettable situation. [Laughter] They often rely on rules of thumb or consistency, right, this bugaboo of consistency. I often have editors try to do things like “eliminate needless words,” which is one of those rules that you’re supposed to follow.

Gretchen: But if the word really is needless, like, what is “needless”?

Julie: Well, that’s just it. And it can vary within the same structure. To give a couple of examples, let’s say we have a sentence like, “Marisa said the prize was funded by dirty money.” If I wrote, “Marisa said that the prize was funded by dirty money,” we can drop the “that” and quite happily say, “Marisa said the prize was funded by dirty money.” That’s a needless word. We can eliminate that. But now, let’s suppose the sentence was “Marisa claimed the prize was funded by dirty money.”

Gretchen: Eh, because then Marisa could be claiming the prize for herself – not making a claim about the prize – and “that” really helps us disambiguate there.

Julie: Exactly. You run into one of those garden path walls there if you don’t have the disambiguating word “that.” “That” is actually doing a fair bit of work.

Gretchen: If you’ve got this relatively simplistic heuristic that “that” is always unnecessary, you’re going through, and you’re just trying to cut all the “thats.” I think that’s where rules like “Don’t use the passive” come from. Because there is a style of writing that can be a little bit overwrought that uses unnecessarily formal or convoluted sentence structures, some of which are passives and some of which are other things. You could say as a heuristic, you know, “Every time you use the passive, think about whether it’s really necessary,” which gets boiled down into “Never use the passive.”

Julie: And because people don’t have a sense of – think about whether it’s necessary. They don’t have the tools for thinking about, “Okay, is it necessary? Is it useful? Is it doing what I want?” That’s where linguistics can really come in and fill that gap, I think.

Gretchen: One of the things that I remember finding so, so interesting when I was first learning linguistics was to be like, “Wow, languages can do this? Languages can do this?” There are so many different ways of being a person who uses language than I had realised before I was exposed to it from a linguistics perspective.

Julie: Can you say a little bit more about that?

Gretchen: Like, even thinking, okay, there’re all these sounds that can exist in languages, but there’s not an infinite list. Linguists have made a list of them, and that’s the number of sounds that we’re aware of. Or sign languages have a fully-fledged grammar and different ways of relating to each other. Or there’re some languages where the verb goes at the end of the sentence or other languages where it goes at the beginning. There’s more ways that language can be than just the languages that I’d previously been exposed to.

Julie: Right, yeah, the variety of ways of expressing a thought. Absolutely. It’s fascinating. Especially if you start working with those wonderful problem sets from non-Indo-European languages. And yet, they’re constrained. There are some kinds of things that languages don’t seem to do that seem to place some boundaries around what it means to be a human being who tries to encode thoughts in this linear format of sound.

Gretchen: Yeah, it sometimes brings me this sense of awe to experience, “Oh, the reason why we say this word in this particular way is actually based on the constraints of the shape of the human mouth.” It’s not some sort of abstract principle. It’s actually that it’s harder to move your tongue that way.

Julie: Or constraints of human memory. These are the syntactic options available to you, but we don’t get outside of that because we just can’t hold certain types of things in working memory.

Gretchen: This brings us to our last question, which I think we’re already getting towards, which is, if you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be?

Julie: In a way, looking at the range of languages gives us a sense of the limits of being human – you know, how far we can stretch those varieties and also where those limits reach an end. To me, linguistics is very much about the science of us. It’s about how – not just the possibilities that language form can take, but also, the ways in which we negotiate meaning when we encounter failures of language. The points at which they break, or we haven’t expressed our thoughts clearly – what kinds of psychological mechanisms can come to our rescue so that we can still understand each other despite the, for example, rife ambiguity that’s there in language or the fact that we often express our thoughts very incompletely. We’re often filling in the blanks between each other’s sentences to give added depth and meaning. It’s really a study for how this form that we use interacts with other aspects of being human.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all of the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get access to transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get access to scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA, branching tree diagrams, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like bold bouba and kiki designs on a range of totes, shirts, mugs, and scarves – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I’m on social media as gretchenmcculloch.com on Bluesky, @gretchen.mcculloch on Instagram, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. You can follow our guest, Julie Sedivy, at juliesedivy.com or by the same name on Bluesky. Her books are called Memory Speaks and Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love. We’ll link to an excerpt.

Lauren: 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, or 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 with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include the plot twist in our chat with Kory Stamper (about her book True Color) and the linguistics of idioms. We also have a bonus episode chat with Lauren and Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist about making linguistics podcasts.

Gretchen: Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Or leave us a nice review, like this one from Stirling Silver, who said, “Love this podcast. Interesting topics explained well. Perfectly pitched to its audience. It’s not too academic nor over-explained. The delivery is so friendly. It’s as if I’m hanging out with friends. My only complaint is I want more frequent episodes.”

Lauren: 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.

Julie: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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