Valerie Fridland: The Amazing and Um, Complex World of Linguistics

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, podcaster and wannabe linguist. This is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is Valerie Fridland. Her last name is spelled F-R-I-D-L-A-N-D, and I sure hope that Fridland is the right pronunciation because it would be embarrassing and oh so ironic if I'm mispronouncing the last name of a linguistics professor.
But anyway, she is a professor in the department of English at the University of Nevada in Reno. Her expertise, however, extends far beyond the academic sphere. Valerie imparts her knowledge of language's critical role in professional life and leadership in businesses and government organizations. This includes Charles Schwab and the Serbian Ministry of Culture. Her work has earned her widespread recognition, with appearances as a language expert on CBS News and NPR. She writes a popular language blog on Psychology Today called “Language in the Wild.”
Her latest book, Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English, delivers a lively exploration of the speech habits we love to hate and why they make us better communicators.
We are going to cover some esoteric linguistic topics today such as the singular they, vocal fry, the different meaning of um and uh and courtroom strategies you should know just in case you're arrested. I must admit that I lost track of time during this interview, and it's because her answers were so damn interesting.
One of my goals for my podcast is that the guests do most of the talking. I think Valerie broke the record today, and it is a testament to her because when I listen to other podcasts and the guest so totally dominates the conversation, a lot of times it's because they have nothing to say. This was not the problem in this case as you will soon hear.
You will also learn why she could have as much impact on my life as Jane Goodall. So let's dive into the world of linguistics with Valerie Fridland. By the way, this is the most lightly edited episode of Remarkable People ever, and you'll hear why.
I want to start off nothing to do with your book, but reaching into my dark past at Apple, which is I am very interested in what a linguist says about Apple's think different campaign.
Valerie Fridland:
Oh, that's funny because no, I'm not. I was not offended. I'm a linguist, so I would take issue with taking a prescriptive position on that.
It is funny because of course, what we see atrophying over time in English, one of the things, although many, many things also increase in complexity, but one of the things we see is the deletion of the -ly adverbial ending on so many different cases.
And I'd say it's probably most prominent in younger speakers not to use them at all, I walked slow to the car, that kind of thing, or it went quick rather than it went quickly. So think different didn't bother me at all, but I would not be surprised that you had an inundation of people complaining about the lack of an -ly adverbial ending.
Guy Kawasaki:
There was a lot of English teachers who switched to Windows when we did that maybe.
Valerie Fridland:
Well, that seems a little extreme to me. I'm sure they came back once I rethought it. That's pretty funny.
Well, I think you know if you read in my book that I think the English that we learn in school and the English that we know as a linguist departs on those issues. Well, the funny thing about the -ly adverbial ending is it's actually a shortening of the like ending. So it comes from L-Y-K-E in Old English, which is a derivative of like. So he walks slowlyke. That was actually the original way that you formed it-
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
Valerie Fridland:
... and then it became slowly. So we're just continuing the same path of evolution, so it's funny to me that people get so upset over these things when they're already doing something that was an abbreviation or a shortening of something that was in previous English. So yes, slowly, the -ly, is from like when it was swanlyke, uneasylyke, slowlyke.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I will say that you telling me that basically doubled the number of people in the world who understood that that's a truncation. I have never heard that, so wow.
Valerie Fridland:
Well, that's my job, right? That's why I had to write my book. So I think your next campaign should be think differentlyke.
Guy Kawasaki:
But that's going in the wrong direction. It should be just think dif.
Valerie Fridland:
Yeah, quite possibly. I think you should change it up. Go both ways.
Guy Kawasaki:
So we're joking about this, but can you explain how language evolves, how linguistics evolves over time?
Valerie Fridland:
Yes. I mean, that's what a person like me looks at. I think a lot of people, when they hear the word linguist, they think of the regular linguist, not the theoretical linguist, which is what I am. And linguists, in that general sense, the laypeople term, would be just people who study a lot of languages. I am a theoretical linguist, which means I'm really useless on a trip.
So if you're going to take me somewhere they speak a different language, I cannot help you. You're going to have to find the bathroom on your own. I can't help you with that. I can probably order a glass of wine or a beer, because those are words I know in almost every language, but I'm not going to be able to help you much in terms of speaking to people because my interest as a theoretical linguist is what is the underlying structure that drives language?
So what are the cognitive principles that underlie language? What is the articulatory structure that allows us to produce language? What is the acoustic structure that we are able to perceive when we hear sound? So I'm really looking at the structure of language and how it has normal tendencies or things that are seem to be cognitive or articulatory preferences. And we can learn about those by looking at languages across the board.
So if you look at 500 different languages and they all do something the same way, or slight variations of the same thing, then you can ascertain that there's probably an underlying reason, some sort of cognitive articulatory reason why they all do it that way.
So we look for patterns, and then we make assumptions based on those patterns. And it has lots of different uses, but one of them is that when we look at how language changes over time, by looking back at old evidence we have... Now, obviously we didn't have Apple or voice memo back in 1000, so we have to rely on written texts that existed.
And these are things like, a lot of times, histories written by monks, for example, or a lot of epic poems such as Beowulf. We don't have a lot of Old English literature, but we do have some and it gives... And the chronicles, a lot of chronicles, because if you were a king in your district, you wanted to record all your exploits for posterity. So we do have a lot of chronicles.
And what we find is we can study not just the structure of language in terms of how English looked back then, but also by looking at the different Old English dialects and how they recorded their histories, we can see where these different areas use different forms and look for sociolinguistic patterns, which is what I'm interested in. So what do social facts about you and linguistic facts about you combine to create? And those are dialects usually.
And so we don't have recordings from back in the heyday of English during Beowulf's time, but we do have evidence of both written language and written variation that can give us hints both to how language has changed over time. And let me just give you a little sneak peek at my book. It's changed a lot. And what variations existed simultaneous to that.
So even back in 900, we see northern British speakers and, well, they weren't British at the time, but northerners and southerners speaking quite different dialects because of different types of cultural forces and different kinds of speakers that coexisted there, speaking different languages or dialects. So we do get a lot of evidence historically. Then I take evidence that I measure in real time. So I go out and talk to people, which is revolutionary these days to actually go record people in person. The pandemic was bad for linguists, let me tell you.
So we get a lot of speech data, we call them corpora, which you're probably, if you work in any type of computational field, you're used to corpora that are used for large language training models, training data. But we do the same thing, only we go record speakers that meet certain specifications. So if we want to compare two groups, we make sure there are people belonging to those groups, and then we see what are they doing, how do they vary and how does this compare to the historical records that we have. We also go back and look at literature and we look at diaries from, for example, the early modern period and we put all that together and we can come to understand why we do all the weird and wacky stuff we think we do in modern speech.
And the secret there is that we actually aren't that wacky or that crazy, and we have changed less over the last 200 years vastly than we changed over the previous 500.
So we're actually really slowing down the pace of language change, not speeding it up like people think. That's a long answer to a short question.
Guy Kawasaki:
No kidding. Before I forget this thought, with this discussion of the truncation of adverbs, when you wrote your manuscript, at some point you gave it to a copy editor. And would the copy editor, if you had just used the word slow instead of slowly, would he or she have corrected that, or would you make the case, "Hey, this is how it is now. You're wrong. I'm right"?
Valerie Fridland:
Well, that's actually really interesting because I had several of those discussions with... I actually had a copy editor and two or three proofreaders because of the way they don't want anything wrong, especially in a book around language.
And every single time it went through that process, they would go and find something in the book that I had intended to be representative of speech this era, but they were still really tied to these prescriptive, this norms about what it should be, and we would have a back and forth.
As the author, they did give me a wide range of discretion to make a case for one form over the other. But several times, they would question me on certain choices I made to represent colloquial speech in the writing. And generally speaking, I won out at the end of that.
So it was a discussion, actually, that I had several times, and I think it's because my whole book is about modern speech features we love to hate. And copy editors are primary in the group that tend to love to hate them as long with English teachers. So it was a really fun back and forth, actually.
And my first copy editor, or my first proofreader, and I actually had a really good time having conversations about it. So I think it ended up being good for both of us to think about those questions, but it's funny you should bring that up because it actually did happen.
Guy Kawasaki:
And from this kind of observation right now, how long before this kind of change appears in the Chicago Manual of Style or the AP guide? When am I going to pick up Chicago Manual of Style and it says, "You don't need to add the -ly to an adverb anymore"?
Valerie Fridland:
Usually, that happens... I mean, it doesn't always happen. So we can have very widespread colloquial forms and they never get recorded in there. So a good example of that is the variation between walkin' and walking, right? The -ing participial ending. I don't think that will ever make it. I mean, the funny thing is it was actually in style guides in the 1800s as being totally appropriate to use the -in ending.
But that has really shifted, and I don't think that MLA or Chicago style guide will ever bring that back because the -in ending, walkin', which we write with an apostrophe to show its colloquialness, that is considered a naturally informal colloquial form. So that will never make it into a formal style guide because that's the antithesis of what those guides were made to happen.
But just as an example, for singular they, it has been around and widely used for 700 years and it just now made it, I think in 2010, into the MLA and Chicago style guide. So, I mean, hopefully not all changes take 700 years to get put in a style guide, but usually there has to be, I'd say, a mass adoption of that feature by not just colloquial speakers, but more formal context where it has passed muster with the editors and the copy editors and the proofreaders to be something that's so widespread that it no longer has stigma attached.
And I think with singular they, the inclusion of singular they was driven by more social consciousness awareness, but it also is incredibly prevalent. I don't think there is an English speaker around that doesn't use it, at least in the epicene or unisex context, like everybody loves their mother, because that should be a singular his or her mother if you are following the traditional forms of what we expect from a prescriptive standpoint.
But almost all of us would say, "Everyone needs to get their ticket." No one says, "Everybody needs to get his or her ticket," in casual speech. So I think that is both a social awareness that has increasingly come into our culture, but also the fact that it was just so overwhelming the number of people who used it, it seemed silly to keep it out of style guides because it was creeping in almost every article people read.
So I think there's just a mass adoption that drives it, but it still takes a very long time, and some things never make it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, so I just want to confirm what I just heard. You're telling me that according to the MLA and Chicago Manual of Style, it is now okay to use singular they?
Valerie Fridland:
Yes, yes, yes. It's been about ten years, I think, that most of these style guides have said that singular they in articles and-
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Valerie Fridland:
... books is appropriate. And in fact, I think in my book that we use it quite a few times. And that was something that was flagged by a copy editor and said that... And actually, the copy edit comment to that said, "Note, singular they used here, although this is now accepted." It actually called it out and then made a point to say, "But it's okay by style guide usage." But yes, many style guides now allow singular they.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. Okay, so now we're going to get to the Jane Goodall moment. All right?
Valerie Fridland:
Uh-oh. Okay.
I'm not sure I can hold a candle to Jane Goodall, but we'll try.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, don't worry. You're right up there. You are the Jane Goodall of sociolinguistics. Okay? So. I've interviewed her three times for this podcast, and now whenever I eat meat, I really feel guilty. So I don't eat it that often. So you're wondering, "What the hell does this have to do with me?" Right?
So I will tell you that when I record a podcast, step number one is we remove almost every filler word, every um, uh, well, you know, I mean, okay, every one of them, and my logic has been I want people to listen to my podcast and think the person is extremely eloquent and can just think fast and be remarkable, et cetera, et cetera. And then I read your book and it's telling me about the value of the um and the uh to signal that here's something important coming. I'm not just ripping through the bullshit. I'm actually thinking. I'm pausing. And so the simple question I have for you is, should I or should I not take out the filler words?
Valerie Fridland:
Well, I think that's... Okay, that is kind of a trick question because that's... Let me say there's two different ways to look at it, and I think both depend on your personal beliefs about what you want to represent in your podcast.
But first answer I would say is you're pointing to something where the social value we assign to a feature is in conflict with the linguistic value that that feature adds to our speech in terms of either cognitive processing, articulatory ease or communicative efficiency. And many times things, and the point I'm making in my book is many times these speech features we see as bad are bad because of our social beliefs and our stereotypes about the speakers that tend to bring innovations into language.
So when we look back over history, who do we see that leads in language change? The young, the female and the disenfranchised. And there are very good reasons why this happens, and it's really tied to who is most conservative in protecting the status quo and where they are in the hierarchy.
And when you look at who that is, it's generally not the young, the female or the disenfranchised. It's men typically and older speakers typically that have control over the institutions that promote the preservation of the status quo.
So when you look at natural, inherent linguistic tendencies, you look at communicative tendencies, you look at articulatory efficiency, what you find is we have very natural tendencies towards most of these features that emerge in our language that we don't like while they're happening, while they're new to us.
And because the groups that lead in language change tend to be groups that we have cultural stereotypes about that are generally negative, it leads to discrimination against those features and a devaluing of those features socially. But that social devaluing is actually in conflict with the very reason why those features came into our speech.
So discourse markers, which you're referring to as filler words in part, so you're talking about two different types of things but linguists would consider those two different types of things, the things you mentioned. You said um and uh, which we call filled pauses or disfluency markers or hesitation markers. And then you also talked about what we call discourse markers, which are things like you know, I mean, well, of course, so, like, that start off sentences a lot of times.
So those are actually very different. If you study how they pattern, if you study how they're used, they actually are structurally different. And they do different work for us communicatively, and they actually do different things for us in terms of cognitive processing. So we would count them as separate categories.
But regardless, a lot of times people see them as the same, as useless, as meaningless, as not contributing to the value of our talk. From a linguistic standpoint, that's not true. That is absolutely not true.
From a social standpoint, an argue could be made that given the social values of our current culture, of this particular cultural moment, that they aren't valued, at least by a lot of people who control the resources, and therefore you have an argument to get rid of them. I, for one, believe in the linguistic value and the communicative value of those types of speech features, and they're far from meaningless. I think in my book, I make a really good argument that both discourse markers and filled pauses arise for reasons, and research that we've done over the decades overwhelmingly supports the value linguistically and cognitively and conversationally of these features.
So for example, um and uh are really good at both signaling to a listener that you need a delay. Not only that, but whether you choose uh or um signal to a listener how long a delay you need. So they communicate information at a meta level of conversation.
They also signal cognitive processing of a higher degree. So the more cognitive processing you do, the more likely you're going to um or uh, which signals, "I'm doing some really heavy thinking here rather than just floating along."
A really interesting study that was done is you show someone a picture, you ask them to describe it. If you've seen that picture before, it's easier for them to describe it in terms of not using ums and uhs than if they've seen it for the first time.
So repetition in repeating what they've seen actually decreases the amount of ums and uhs. Now, why would that be? Because it's easier to describe something you've already described before. You're not having to activate the neural networks to the same degree. You're thinking less hard, right, so you're doing less work in doing it. So you um and uh less.
So why would we be upset at something that's signaling that we're really working hard cognitively and we're actually using more uncommon, less familiar, more complex, more abstract structures and words? We find that all of those promote the use of um and uh.
So that tells me that I'm actually contributing really valuable resources to the conversation, and that my uhs and ums signal both how intensely I'm thinking, how difficult the context and the words and the structures I'm creating, and then also they give you a hint of when it's your turn to talk. So all really, really valuable things. And then filler words also have their own value.
And we can get into that separately, because I don't want to talk the whole time about just these two things, but my argument would be based on that linguistic information, based on the cognitive and communicative efficiency and value that they add, you should leave them in as long as they're not distracting.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Valerie Fridland:
Did I convince you?
Guy Kawasaki:
So now, I cannot eat meat and I cannot remove filler words. My whole life has changed. The arc of my life has changed.
Valerie Fridland:
I'm sorry.
I don't eat much meat either, so I'm with you on that one. That one's a hard one to give up though. I do love a steak.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I think you called me a racist if I delete um and uh. I most certainly don't want to be-
Valerie Fridland:
I did call you an -ist. I called you an -ist, but it was more a prescriptivist.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, all right, so I will take that under advisement. We also provide written transcripts of every episode. Are we supposed to leave the "um", "uh"s, "I mean", "you know"s, all those two categories of words? Are we supposed to leave them in in the written word too?
Valerie Fridland:
Well, I think that's a really good question and that's a very different question than in speech when we're doing online processing. Because what those forms do is they help with online processing, they help with online reception of a listener as well.
But when you're reading, it actually is a very different part of your brain that's activated. It's a very different skill that you're using and it is more sort of something you learn rather than acquire naturally. So I don't necessarily argue for leaving speech features in written form. I think when you're reading, they can actually be a bit distracting because you don't have that online processing work that they're doing when they're in your speech.
However, "um"s and "uh"s are interesting because they've taken over, well, "um" particularly as a discourse marker. So in addition to being a filled pause, what we find, led not surprising by young women primarily, but also young men.
So, it started with women. Women do it more than men do, but young men do it almost as much as young women. They have increased their use of "um" as a filled pause. Now, this doesn't mean that young people and women use more filled pauses overall. Men actually use a higher rate of "uh" and less "um" overall. So what we find is women and young people are using more "um" because it's becoming a discourse marker to signal disalignment with something that had previously been said that you're about to say.
So if you invite me over for dinner and you say, "Oh, do you eat meat?" And I know you've just made a chicken cacciatore and I hate for you to ... or a steak, and I hate for you to now know once I'm there and you've already cooked that I don't eat it, I might go, "Um, not really." So that "um" there is signaling, I'm about to say something that I'm aware of might be upsetting and so I'm mitigating my disagreement.
And actually, when we look at where "um" sentence initially occurs, a lot of times it seems to align with something that's contrastive that's following. So you're marking that you're making a contrastive point. So that "um" probably would be useful to keep in the writing because it's doing work communicatively in terms of content or literal or semantic meaning that is being used to interpret.
So in that case, I think you might want to leave it in, but I won't argue as strongly for you to leave your "um"s and "uh"s generally in your written transcripts.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, so you explained what an "um" signifies. What's an "uh?" What if I said, "Uh, I don't eat meat"? What does that mean versus, "Um, I don't eat meat"?
Valerie Fridland:
That just means you're probably less certain. Really, "uh" tends to ... What we find ... Okay, there was a really interesting study done in the 1990s where researchers were asking college students questions that were one-word answers. And what they did was they took questions that were easily answered, so most of us would have easy access to that answer.
So like, what was the name of your dog growing up? What was the name of your pet growing up? Well, most of us can come up with that answer pretty easily. Or what's the name of your best friend? We have that stored really easy accessed information. But if I ask you in what sport is the Stanley Cup awarded? A lot of people won't know that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Hockey.
Valerie Fridland:
I mean, I'm not really a sports fan. See, you knew it right away. But for me, I was like, well, I don't know. What sport is that, right? Well, so what you find is people will "uh" if they think they have access to that information pretty readily, but they don't have it at the tip of their tongue, and they'll "um" if they need more time to come up with that. So that's using them truly as filled pauses, though, and not as a discourse marker. "Um" seems to be preferred as a discourse marker.
So while you could say, "Uh, I don't really like meat," it's much more likely among younger speakers and women to "um" there. And that seems to be partially because of the sound symbolism of an "um", and that's a whole other different topic. But when you say "uh", if you notice my mouth is wide open, my tongue's just hanging out. It's not a very pretty sound, right? It just sort of sounds like someone punched you in the gut. Ugh. That's not really what we want to walk around saying. So, it's not polite. It's not polite. And we do love to be polite.
So when I say "um", see how that's much more pretty and pleasant? It doesn't have that kind of I'm about to spit at you sort of look. So we think that that actually is playing a role in the preference of "um" as a discourse marker over "uh". So it's not that you couldn't say "uh" there, it's just less likely that it would happen, and it might then correlate more to uncertainty that takes you a minute.
It's just sort of ... Then it's marking that you're doing some cognitive searching in your lexicon for that word versus using "um". That may also mean, okay, I know the answer, but I know it's an answer that's dispreferred and therefore I'm marking it by indicating to you I'm aware it will be a dispreferred answer. So that's sort of meta-communicative.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my God.
Valerie Fridland:
It's very fascinating, isn't it?
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm going to have to think so much more when I answer somebody now.
Valerie Fridland:
Well, you just can't use those quick programs that do it for you if you want to be more careful about how you do it. Sorry, I'm creating more work for you. I'm sorry not sorry, actually.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is a true story. So, I have a friend who's from the UK who has this beautiful British accent, and I once asked her to record my voicemail message because frankly, I don't think anybody with a British accent can be possibly stupid. I have to admit, whenever I hear a British accent, I think, "This is a smart, classy person." So I asked her to do my voicemail and we agreed that we're trying to get the British sound, which she achieved. And so I want your opinion. Am I being a bad person if I do something like that and ask someone with a British accent to record my voicemail message?
Valerie Fridland:
Well, as long as she's not a stranger that you accost on a street, no.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, no, no.
Valerie Fridland:
As long as you're not stalking her, I think it's absolutely fine. This is actually a really funny story that you have because it really points to how deeply ingrained our social beliefs about language are, right? Because is there really anything more valuable or smarter about a British accent from a purely linguistic perspective? Absolutely not. Right? There was nothing historically about it that's better.
And in fact, it's interesting because in the early days of the colonies and in the eighteenth century when British would come over to America, they would remark on how well-spoken Americans were. Now, it changed later, and they remarked a lot after the Civil War about how bad we spoke and how we had bastardized British English.
But initially, because there was actually a lot of uniformity in the Americas in the way that English had been brought over, although there were actually regional differences, but people often remarked on the uniformity of American English versus British English at the time; that there were a lot less class-based differences, a lot less sort of changes. It just seemed more uniform.
So it's funny that that actually has shifted. And after the Revolutionary War, they didn't really think American accents were so hot after that. And a lot of the reason that we think British accents are so wonderful is tied to the status of Britain in the American imagination during the colonial times.
It was the mother country and many people had a lot of family there. Their families were from there, history was from there. They looked to Britain as being the cultural capital. America was kind of rough and tough and you had to fight for survival. So we looked towards Britain as being the cultural and economic place to be.
And in fact, for many years, people in the South, especially the Virginia colonies, sent their children back to Britain for education, which is one of the reasons that we find some retaining of certain British features that changed since the time of the main mass migration to the colonies because the people that sent their children back, the colonies that tended to send their children back retained or learned new features of British English that came in after most of the colonies had been established.
So for example, the R dropping in British English, so you know, car, park, heart, instead of heart, park, and car. That actually was a nineteenth century change. It was not considered prestigious in Britain until the nineteenth century. So the vast number of colonists came before that happened, which is why we have Rs in American English.
But look in New England or the Virginia colonies, they sent their kids back. So their kids adopted this new London standard and brought it back to those areas, which is what gave rise to some differences in American dialects. So I think what you're reacting to is the historical and cultural significance of Britain in the eyes of most Americans that then got associated with the social belief about the value of their speech.
So we tend to think that British accents are beautiful, they're prestigious, they have high status, they're super smart, they're associated with royalty. They come loaded with these social stereotypes that we have based on this socio-historical development of American speech. So that's a long answer to, "No, don't feel bad. What it says is that you are just valuing where American English initially came from." And I'm with you. I think a good British accent is fabulous.
Guy Kawasaki:
So if Meghan Markle picked up a British accent, maybe the rest of the royal family would accept her.
Valerie Fridland:
Yeah, I think that she's well past that. Americans might like her better. I don't think the British are that impressed by British accents, but Americans seem to be.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Well, but they're certainly not impressed by American accents.
Valerie Fridland:
Oh, no, definitely not. No. So the same socio-historical occurrences that made us like British accents make them dislike American accents, right? They look at as American English as sort of a bastardization of British English.
And as American English has become more global because the power of this nation has risen far past the power of Britain, which used to be an empire, that value that they put on American English has gone down because it feels like it's invading Britishness. And so I think it's just a natural predisposition to social reality of the way that Americans are positioned.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you opened the door to this, which is-
Valerie Fridland:
Uh oh.
Guy Kawasaki:
Which is my ... Wait, before I go down this path, I want to know if it's okay with you if I crack a tasteless, grotesque perhaps ... tasteless is the best word for it, joke, depending on how this goes, are you going to be offended?
Valerie Fridland:
Well, I don't know. When you preface it like that, it's hard to say yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, I don't want to-
Valerie Fridland:
But I have a pretty good sense of humor, so sure.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Okay. So you opened the door to the topic of rhoticity, which is this-
Valerie Fridland:
Oh, yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
Right?
Valerie Fridland:
Right, big word. I'm impressed. Rhoticity.
Guy Kawasaki:
Hey.
Valerie Fridland:
That's a big word.
Guy Kawasaki:
I told you, I read your book.
Valerie Fridland:
Linguistics word. I am very impressed.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, I want to tell you that my favorite line in your whole book is, quote, "This difference is what linguists call rhoticity, which strangely always makes me hungry for chicken." When I read that, I just busted up. And I don't know how many people got that joke, but it is just brilliant.
Valerie Fridland:
I'm glad you like it. I do. I like to joke that if I hadn't become a linguist, I would've been a comedian. So at least you get me. At least you get me. Well, I'm glad you like that because it really does make me think of rotisserie, doesn't it? It's perfect. Rhoticity, rotisserie. Doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?
Guy Kawasaki:
We talked about the British accent. No, it doesn't. So we talked about the British accent, and now I'm going to flip to the other side, which is I am from Hawaii. I was born and raised there. I left when I was about eighteen. And so I have the remnants of a pidgin accent. And if anybody from Hawaii heard me, they would immediately pick up that I'm from Hawaii.
They can detect this pidgin in me no matter how conscious I am of trying to not use it. And so honestly, it still bothers me and pains me when I say something like one sentence and somebody can say, "You're from Hawaii. What part of Hawaii are you from?" And if I were to properly answer that in pidgin, I would say, "Yeah, brah. I'm from Hawaii. I'm from Kalihi Valley, brah." That's pidgin to pidgin.
So now, is this wrong? I mean, should you be proud of your accent and not try to change? I'm not saying I'm going to go to a British accent, but I think people, if they hear me really use a pidgin accent, they're going to have a lower opinion of me. Am I being paranoid?
Valerie Fridland:
That makes me sad. That makes me sad. I mean, really, why? It's a beautiful accent that tells people about you as a person. And isn't that important? Isn't that connection and identity, isn't that important to us?
The fact that we would devalue an accent that shows who someone is, where they came from, and who they might identify with, at least at some point of their life, that makes me sad that people would have stereotypes about them. And what you're talking about is social stereotypes that people hold about Hawaiians and about Hawaiian pidgin that then get transmitted to you despite all your accomplishments, right?
That what they value is speech, and their beliefs about speech over the reality of speech and the reality of who you are and what you've done. So what I would say to that is that's shame on them, not shame on you because really it's-
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Valerie Fridland:
... their loss rather than yours. That said, it's certainly true that we have social stereotypes and we do apply stereotypes about speakers because the thoughts about people being not educated that we assign to a lot of lower class or ethnic dialects or ethnic varieties is based on our beliefs about speakers, not on the actuality of those speakers. You don't speak pidgin because you're dumb.
You speak pidgin because it is a factor of where you grew up. What was the dialect of the area you grew up in and that it was about connection and solidarity and communication. That's half of the reason we talk to each other. When I wake up in the morning and I see my spouse or my kids ... Well, actually, half the time, I don't want to talk to my kids in the morning, so let's take them out of this whole thing. I have teenagers.
But if I see my spouse and I say, "Hey, how's it going?" That's not about information. I mean, I saw them the night before. It can't have changed that much. It's really just about connection. It's about showing solidarity and that we belong together in some way, that we're friends and we're close and we're intimate. And that's when you learn the dialect that you grew up in. It's an affiliation with region and its affiliation with the people that made you and the people that you interact with.
And so the value of that is really immense. To devalue it is insulting. So I would absolutely say that you shouldn't be embarrassed about it. In fact, you should have an opportunity to educate because you're so successful on your own. You do something that's speech related every day. It gives you the opportunity to reconfigure people's stereotypes about a Hawaiian pidgin speaker.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my God. Maybe we should end this podcast now. You've given me so much homework to do. Although you reduced the amount of work I have to do about taking out filler words, so we'll add pidgin into it.
Valerie Fridland:
Exactly. Exactly.
Guy Kawasaki:
It all works out.
Valerie Fridland:
And how lucky you are. I would love to have been born in Hawaii. I love Hawaii. Honolulu and Waikiki are two of my favorite spots. And actually, I love Hawaiian pidgin. I think it's amazing. And I don't think ... The other thing is, I actually don't think that most people that aren't familiar with Hawaiian pidgin, which is many, many people, would know that that's the accent you have.
I think people might notice that there is an accent, but I don't think the majority of American English speakers would be able to place it. You know where it's from, and maybe more people on the West Coast, California, because they travel to Hawaii more often. But the vast majority would not think that. They would think, "Oh, there's an accent," but I don't think they'd know it, like where it's from.
Guy Kawasaki:
I wish I had learned this thirty years ago. But anyway, okay.
Valerie Fridland:
It's never too late to start.
Guy Kawasaki:
Next topic.
Valerie Fridland:
Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
Next topic. Let's discuss what I consider a most fascinating case study in linguistics. Not that I know much about linguistics, but the evolution of the meaning and connotation of the word "woke". Because to me, being woke is a positive thing. I'm not asleep, I'm not stupid, I'm not irresponsible. I'm not a lot of things. Now, all of a sudden it's bad to be woke. So what happened here? How did this happen?
Valerie Fridland:
Well, it underwent a process that we call semantic pejoration in linguistics. And you can have it either go amelioration or pejoration. Words can go either direction. So some words start off bad and become good over time in meaning. Other words start off fine and become bad in meaning over time.
So for example, another word that that's happened to over time is the word mistress. It used to be that mistress simply meant the female of the house, like the master and the mistress of the house, of the manner. So it was good to be a mistress, but today, not many people want to say, "Yes, I'm proud of being a mistress," because it has undergone this pejoration of meaning over time.
And the reason it happens is because of sort of social cultural context that takes that word and shifts its meaning in a way that either is just organic over time, that it gets used in various ways. It can either happen because of cultural beliefs.
So women being masters of anything are often sexualized. And that's how mistress became so pejorative over time is its association with women and sexuality and sort of women who were in control of things would've had sexual control. And also our tendency to think of women in a sexualized fashion. So that's really where a social, cultural belief impacted the word and made the meaning get worse over time.
But with woke, which actually has been around a lot longer than ... It's not a new word. It's a new word to us, but it's not a new word in Black culture. And in fact, I don't know the etymological history in terms of the exact date, but my understanding of woke is it's something that has been around for over fifty years in Black culture to mean to another African American, be aware.
Be aware, be out there, be woke. Be safe. Be safe. It sort of means be safe because with the reference to the kind of cultural consequences of being Black in America, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, when I think with the initial use of that word happened where it was like just be safe out there. You know what happens to a person that's Black in America, so keep your eyes out. And white people didn't use that word. It was really in Black culture.
But with things like Black Twitter and TikTok where there's been a sort of really valuation of African American culture and it has given more speakers access to words in Black culture, and a lot of those words, especially with the last two decades, with sort of the reconsideration of Black culture's role in America and a lot of prevalence of hip hop and music becoming really something that all races enjoy and embrace, I think a lot of words that come from Black culture have been embraced as hip, cool, edgy, rebellious, which again is a lot to do with the stereotypes we put on Black culture rather than anything truly emergent from that culture itself, right? This idea of danger and rebelliousness.
And so woke is one of those words that got taken out of context and repurposed in a way that took on already a new meaning. It subtly shifted in meaning when it was removed from the initial context of one Black person to another Black person saying, "Be safe out there, because we both recognize this overarching cultural threat to our safety," to being a sort of word used more widespread among all sorts of races to mean being aware of having a social consciousness about race relationships and race issues in America, to then being something that was applied by usually people in that lean right in politics to refer to anything they saw as overreach in terms of social consciousness.
And so they would use "woke" as a way to destroy that word's credibility in those other contexts where it was previously used.
So if you start using a word in a different way ... And we see this a lot of times with words that are previously bad. So, the N word is a good example of a word that's been reclaimed and repurposed and has shifted in meaning. But again, it has a very specific cultural context, and I as a white person shouldn't be throwing it around. Right?
So it has a certain meaning, and by reclaiming that meaning, you've shifted it to be sort of, look, a statement of brotherhood and of being proud of that word if you're in that culture. Well, I think "woke" has been under a similar shift if you are in that culture.
Well, I think woke has been under a similar kind of shifting from being a word that's used by a certain in-group to elicit solidarity and sort of suggest safety to a word that's used in a larger social conscious way to a word that then is repurposed by those that are opposed to those kinds of ideas and ideologies to expand the use to refer to things outside of the original reference of that word.
So woke was often a term just to say I'm socially aware. But now it's a term used by the far-right typically to say anything that's very left-leaning, anything that seems like overreach in terms of social consciousness is now woke. And by doing that, they've sort of turned the word woke on itself. So I think it's not that to the original speakers.
It means anything bad. It's that now it's expanded to be used by speakers to use it to mean something bad, and therefore you cannot be sure when talking to someone which meaning of that word they're going to take from it, which has affected the use of the word overall. Does that make sense?
Guy Kawasaki:
It makes total sense, and... It just pisses me off how the right has changed the meaning of that word, or at least the...
Valerie Fridland:
This happens in language all time channel.
Guy Kawasaki:
... connotation of it.
Valerie Fridland:
It's certainly far from the first time. But here's what's beautiful about language, and hopefully this makes you feel better. Is for every word that's appropriated by somebody else for different meaning, which has happened throughout the course of English.
I mean, English wordstock is like 80 percent different than what it started as. And many of those original words don't mean anything like they mean anymore. So, for example, the word girl means a young female today, but originally girl actually meant just young person. But it started to get used more often to refer to only girls, and that's how it changed in meaning over time. So a knight, the word knight meant servant or young boy in old English, but often those young boys would be knight be take on roles in the king's court, and they became known as knight young men doing that job. So that's how that word shifted.
So words are supposed to shift as we use them in different ways. So I think the lesson there is someone else can take the word and change its meaning. So you come up with a new one, and we always do.
You just develop new language to talk about the same thing, and it just takes a little bit of time for that language to maybe if use or be more diffused through the population.
So I don't think it really means anything bad that language changes. In this one moment, it might feel bad that word has been appropriated in a way that's negative and sort of colored or tainted its use previously. But in the grand scheme of language, this is a very typical process, and we always find ways to surmount it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Valerie Fridland:
There's your pep talk. Does that help?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, that's better. Well, you know. Well, I guess is the interpretation of that, if you are talking to Black people, you'd say, "Don't bother trying to get it back. Find a different, better one."
Valerie Fridland:
No, I think-
Guy Kawasaki:
Or can you recover?
Valerie Fridland:
... actually, here's a situation where I think context is key. So I think most African Americans would say, "I can still use woke like that because it's obvious when I'm using it what I'm meaning."
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Valerie Fridland:
So I think what happens is that sometimes though people move away from a word that has been taken over and appropriated and shifted meaning because they no longer feel that word represents them. So I think it would just depend on the individual speaker. I think one great example of that is the word rizz. Have you heard of the new word rizz that became really popular in on TikTok, I think, maybe in January or so?
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm too old.
Valerie Fridland:
Well, I don't really tend to, but I have teenagers, so that I learn a lot of new things through them, which is what inspired me to write the book in some ways. So rizz is... if you have maximum rizz, that means you're really basically chill with the ladies. You have a lot of allure. It's sort of a new very modern...
Guy Kawasaki:
No wonder I never heard.
Valerie Fridland:
It means you have a lot of attractiveness. It was real originally used to sort of talk about male attractiveness to the ladies. And there were all these TikTok videos that were actually pretty entertaining. You should look them up where people would say, "Yeah, I got rizz."
And it would be a young adolescent boy saying that to the camera and then turning it to look at a bunch of girls running to him on a track team. So they'd be at a track meet or a cross country meet, and then, all of a sudden, these girls would come running to them like, "Oh my God, I love you."
But actually, they're just running the track meet or the cross-country meet, and the guy's just superimposing himself on there. So it was kind of used in jest and in humor. It actually started with... I can't remember the name of the originator, but an African American social influencer, who was talking about his own skill with the ladies in sort of a tongue-in-cheek way.
And he was sort of talking about how you start talking to a lady, and it's not going well, but then by being so suave and cool, you win them over, and that means you have serious rizz because you're able to get the ladies to be attracted to you.
Or the best type of rizz, according to this, Guy, is if you have unspoken rizz, which means you just give them a look. You know that Zoolander Blue Steel look? Do you remember that movie? And it sends the ladies flocking. So he was doing it to be funny. But he said now that it's gotten so appropriated by anybody under the age of thirty, he doesn't even use it anymore.
So it's not that it doesn't mean similar things to what he used it for, but once everybody else has it... The whole point of novelty and words like that is that they are remarkable and they stand out and they set you apart in some way.
So once everybody starts using them, even if they're using them in the same way, who wants to use it that way anymore, which is why then language changes over time? So the bigger question is if someone would want to use woke still or not because it has expanded beyond its original confines of use. But I think that probably happened in the African American communities once woke was appropriated outside that community. I think there were a lot of African American initial users of that word that didn't like its appropriation, even by white liberal left-leaning people because it was an appropriation. So I think appropriation with language is always tricky to navigate in terms of who's going to be happy and who's not.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. Okay, next word. We got a lot of words to cover.
Valerie Fridland:
Uh-oh.
Guy Kawasaki:
Next word. Next word. My kids, in a five-minute conversation, might say the word like forty or fifty times. And there have been times where I sat down, and I tallied how many times they said it, and at the end of this two or three minutes, I said, "You just said like twenty-five times in two minutes."
And then I read your book. So now I am not sure as a parent who wants my kids to be successful and happy and considered intelligent and articulate, et cetera, et cetera. Is it just that I'm sixty-eight years old, and just, "Give it up Guy." They can say like twenty times in two minutes, and it's not a problem.
Valerie Fridland:
Well, first let me ask you how old your child is>
Guy Kawasaki:
I have kids who are... The ones that do it a lot are under twenty.
Valerie Fridland:
That's an important distinction to make because research, unlike you, suggests that it peaks in adolescence and then levels out as kids age up. So that's something in linguistics we call age grading and what that means, it's a feature that has a really youth identity associated with it, and it often has a purpose in terms of modeling that form for younger kids. In the long view of how language change occurs over time, there are a number of different important factors that help language either shift from one generation to the other or change over time. And one of those seems to be what we call an adolescent peak which is adolescents tend to use an incoming feature at a much higher rate than the speakers immediately before them in age group.
So the slightly older people, because they're learning that new feature, they're playing with it, and then it actually serves as a model to younger speakers to highlight the use of that forum.
And then as that age group ages up, they tend to use it less. And we refer to that as age grading in linguistics. Now like is an age graded feature in that way, so it does seem like adolescents use it to a higher degree than older speakers. But it's not fully age-graded in that as those speakers age up, almost all speakers under the age of forty today use like quite a bit more than speakers over forty.
And as you get younger, it's even more extreme. At some point, that levels out, and that like that, change has come to completion. So it's not going to progress any further, meaning we're not going to use it at a higher rate. So two things in reference to your kid that uses it. They're young, and therefore, they're in the adolescent peak. So naturally, as they age up, it will change.
Typically, that happens. Everybody points to some extreme case of some person that's thirty and uses like to a point that's crazy, but that's rare. Honestly, if you walk around and talk to a bunch of thirty-year-olds, they don't do that. They use like. And in fact, several of the episodes I listen to on your podcast, I was listening to two psychologists, evolutionary psychologists, I believe, and I actually noted several like usages in their interview.
But they're older speakers, right, so they're using it to a lesser degree. But younger speakers just use it time and exponentially more because it's an incoming feature. And by the time they age up and become a sixty-year-old, use of like will be so normal that people won't notice it to the degree you're looking at it now. So that's short for saying, "No, you shouldn't worry." Second thing is that I'm going to give you some homework.
In addition, because I do this to my students. I give my students this like homework, so I'm going to give it to you, and anybody listening can try this out too. You've read my book. So the different uses of like, so it's not purposeless and random, which is what we tend to believe. The problem is there are about three major different forms of like used non-traditional.
So traditional uses, of course, are things like using it as a verb. "I like ice cream." Using it as a noun. "I have a dislike or I have a like for something." Using it as a preposition. "He has eyes like the sky," that kind of thing. Using it as a conjunction, which is still actually grammatically in prescriptivist terms not well-loved. But that's saying things like, "It seems like, or I feel like, or I pretend like." Those kinds of usage are more traditional in terms of grammatical use.
The newer ones are using it as an adverbial, and that's basically where you use like in place of about to approximate or estimate something. So, "He's about ten. He's like ten." It's exactly one-to-one. There's nothing useless about it. It's serving exactly the same function as an approximating adverbial as about. People over forty use about, at a much higher rate than people under forty who tend to prefer like. So it's just a shift that's happening over time. Second is as a sentential adverbial, which actually I don't know if you've seen that movie. I think it's The Banshees of Inisherin. Have you seen that with Colin Farrell, I think is his name?
Guy Kawasaki:
Nope.
Valerie Fridland:
It's really funny. It's Irish, and they use like a lot at the end of their sentences. So they'll say something like, "It was smooth like. I was uneasy like." Or just any sentence with a like at the end. That's a sentential adverbial. And there's a hypothesis, and it's British. It's British and Irish. Actually, we find it in court documents from the 1700s in that area, and you still find it in Ireland in especially more rural areas. So it's an old feature, and we think that's probably where the modern like comes from. It's not a Valley girl feature. That's actually a myth.
So what does that do? It's providing estimation over the whole sentence. So when I say, "He's like ten." That's providing estimation over the noun phrase or the adjective or whatever you're following it with right after. "It's like blue. He's like ten." Right? It's the clause or the phrase that follows immediately after. But if you use it at the beginning or the end of the sentence, it's providing approximation or estimation over the whole sentence. "Like, he was a lawyer” or “He was like a lawyer."
Do you see how you're taking this from approximation or estimation in the sentence and moving it to the front? So that's, again, serving for approximation. And the final new use is quotative like, which is where you use it instead of the verb to say, again, a one-to-one substitution. It's just a new form coming in. Younger speakers use like in that context a lot more. But older speakers actually say things like, "It's like, I don't know, five or six miles from here." That is actually a qualitative, or a discourse marker use of that adults, older adults, tend to have adopted pretty early.
So the long story short is, your homework, now that the three different types of like, is to not just count how many likes they use, but do an analysis of the function of those like in their speech. And I am going to tell you that you will find that they're really much more useful than you think. And the reason that you feel like they're so populous is because there's three major purposes that are being served, completely different purposes, by their likes. It just happens to be the same word that's being used. And so it sounds like they're using like a lot. So that's your homework if you choose to accept it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my goodness.
Valerie Fridland:
But does it make you feel better about them like use?
Guy Kawasaki:
Makes me feel worse about myself, but okay. So you said something there that I have to take this opportunity. It just triggered a thought in my brain. So you said that you listened to two or three episodes of my podcast, right?
Valerie Fridland:
Right.
Guy Kawasaki:
So as a linguist, did you have this reaction like, "Oh my God, this podcast is over-edited. There are no filler words. This is bullshit. This is not true to life, and it's overdone. He's touched it too much."
Valerie Fridland:
No, no, because we go with whatever we hear in these contexts so people don't stop and think, "Oh my God, this is weird. It has no ums." They just sort of listen, especially in context that are expected to be more formal or more kind of broadcast speech.
So when we go see a movie, how many times do you sit in a movie theater and like, "Ugh, I'm out of here. They're not saying like. There's no ums. They never say, 'I'm mean.' I don't want to listen to them. It's bullshit." But we don't. We used to using suspended belief in those contexts to listen to this model speech. But here's what the problem with it is. It sets us up to believe that real conversation works that way, which it doesn't. It doesn't work that way. In real conversations every day that we have with people, we don't edit ourselves.
But the thing is, we actually don't notice those ums and uhs.
So what happens when you edit them out is you're doing what we already do. We filter it out unless it's overly populous for our own personal likes and dislikes. So, for example, you hear your daughter or your sons likes more because you dislike them.
And when we dislike something, it's called a frequency illusion. Once you hear it, you hear it everywhere, right. Arnold Zwicky is a linguist that coined that term the frequency illusion because once someone draws your attention to something... And my students laugh because we do this. We'll talk about a feature like um or like in class, and then everybody laughs for the rest of the class period every time someone uses those features because it's so apparent to you, because we were just talking about it.
And that's what's happening with like when you're reacting to your daughter is because you dislike that feature, every time she says it's like she's stabbing you with a knife. But you don't typically do that in general speech.
So when I hear someone talk in a conversation, you don't walk away from a conversation with your neighbor thinking, "Oh my God, they used um fifty times." In fact, if I asked you to estimate how many ums they use, you wouldn't be able to tell me. If you were interested in what they were saying, you probably didn't hear the ums at all or very little. So I don't think it's that different from what we perceive in day-to-day speech when you filter them out of your podcast. So I think we have an expectation in cases like television or podcasting or news broadcast that those are contexts where people do more speech planning. And in cases of speech planning, we would predict fewer uses of um and uh, which is probably why we notice them more in those contexts.
So when you assume someone has rehearsed what they have said or someone knows what they're talking about very deeply, then we anticipate people do have to do less cognitive processing and therefore when they signal a lot of cognitive processing by using um and uh, we think, "Wait a minute, don't they know what they're talking about?" So I think that's probably one of the reasons why it's okay to filter them out in those contexts if you feel strongly about doing it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh. Well, that's 180 degrees shift. Okay.
Valerie Fridland:
Oh, I'm trying to make you feel better about yourself. I personally wouldn't do it, but I don't think there's anything wrong.
Guy Kawasaki:
You're doing a good job. You're doing a good... Okay. I have two topics more, okay, if you still have time.
Valerie Fridland:
Okay. Okay, sure.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So topic number one is, let's say that... And this has to do with vocal fry. Let's say that Elizabeth Holmes hired you at the start of Theranos.
Valerie Fridland:
Uh-huh.
Guy Kawasaki:
What would you have advised her, vis-a-vis lowering her voice or not?
Valerie Fridland:
Okay. So many things I would advise her on beyond just her voice.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, you mean lying?
Valerie Fridland:
Let's have a technology that's not deceptive. But beyond that...
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Valerie Fridland:
That's an interesting question because she claims she's not lowering her voice, but it is extremely low-pitched. And the people have said that they knew her earlier. She didn't lower her voice as much. My answer would be don't lower your voice because it's inauthentic sounding. I think a lot of people saw that as sort of an unusual choice for her to make.
But especially when people started being suspicious about her product, then it sounded incredibly inauthentic and put on. And that is something that does not hit people very well. When you... It's like me putting on a British accent. That's not my authentic self. So much as I might love using a British accent, it's not my natural speech. And people understand that, and they sense that, and it makes me seem inauthentic and disingenuous.
And I think that's actually how her voice shift happened. But that's interesting because here's the other part of that. The reason she did that, I think, is because there's a huge amount of research in psychology on our preferences for voice pitch.
And overwhelmingly, if you look at how preferences of voice on voice pitch play out, lower pitch voices are overwhelmingly preferred for traits like dominance, authority, competence, and even intelligence and even trustworthiness. We find that lower-pitch voices get higher ratings on those, credibility, things like that. In a workplace context, we also find that people that adopt a lower voice tend to correlate with those that take on a more hierarchical high role in a discussion.
So there was a really interesting experiment, and I think it was published in the Journal of Non-Verbal Behavior, oddly enough. But no. It was in the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, I think. Anyway, I'll look that up.
But regardless, it was a really interesting experiment where they had people do tasks as a group in a business setting, and they said, "All right. Here's something that he needs to happen. Here's your job. You guys figure out how to do it. You all figure out how to do it." What they discovered, and they had done an analysis of everybody who was participating in the experiment speech, and they established their baseline pitch.
So in your normal talking voice, what's your pitch? We all have sort of an average pitch.
That's why we recognize speakers when they call us and they just say hello we're actually analyzing their average pitch. And we know our friend's average pitch. We know our husband's average pitch. We know our wife's average pitch, and that allows us to estimate who they are.
But anyway, so they did an average pitch analysis going into the experiment, then they measured their pitch while they were performing the experiment. And what they found was an interesting correlation between those who took on a higher, more organizationally managerial role in performing the task and those that took a lower ranking, lower status role as sort of a worker bee rather than an organizer. And they discovered that the organizers lowered their pitch over the course of the task, and the worker bees essentially raised their pitch over the course of the task.
And this replicates studies that find that those in higher roles organizationally, or those who take expert roles, tend to have lower pitch voices or even lower their voice pitch during that expertise showing or display then those that are not in those roles.
And why wouldn't you then, as a woman, who comes in with a higher pitch voice... Just generally speaking, on average, women have higher pitch voices. Why would you not want to reap the benefits in an environment where you're already fighting against odds to be taken seriously and be viewed with authority?
So what an Australian study done in the 1990s found was over the last fifty years, women have generally lowered their pitch by, I think, it was almost forty hertz. And think of Margaret Thatcher, who took voice lessons to learn to lower her pitch.
Because the message we get as women is, "If you want to be taken seriously, if you want to have authority, you need a lower pitch. You need to do something to make yourself seem more authoritative, to seem to be more competent and seem to be more in control."
And dominance is strongly associated with lower pitch. Now is there anything inherent and lower pitch that makes you more dominant? No. Now an evolutionary psychologist would say that this association with lower pitch and dominance has to do with larger-bodied animals having more power and being sort of …A lion has a deep roar. A mouse has a squeak. That has to do with the size of that animal. And so animals will try to growl or bark or whatever at a lower pitch to come across when they're upset versus their sort of happy noises. I don't know if you've ever heard coyotes when they're just howling to each other. They're kind of yippee. They're like... yip yip yip. But when they're in the kill mode, they have a deeper pitch to their voice because it correlates with dominance and fear.
And so, the correlation from the evolutionary psychology standpoint is that we still associate that socially with dominance, even though it really has no correlation to actuality anymore. Anyway, that's sort of what I would tell Elizabeth Holmes that probably she's not doing herself any favor because it's not natural, but I do understand why she did it. I think that probably is what drove her decision. That was a long answer, but I hope it was an interesting one because I don't think people are that aware of how much voice matters in the world.
CEOs generally, of larger companies who make more money, they've been correlated with having lower pitch voices. Presidential elections in many countries are correlated with the candidate that had lower voices. Now clearly, that's not the only thing that's going on, but it does seem to play a role.
And so, as a woman, that's awful if you're trying to get a job. You're having to compete against these people that naturally get associated with competence, intelligence, and trustworthiness over you.
Guy Kawasaki:
I know Phil Zimbardo, so maybe he and you can get together and redo the prison experiment and see if the guards got lower pitch and the prisoners got higher pitch as a result of this role playing. But-
Valerie Fridland:
Oh, that would be interesting.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm not finished with Elizabeth Holmes yet. Now, fast forward. She's arrested. She's in trial. She's even in sentencing. Now, basically, everybody thinks she's guilty and her legal team during the trial or during sentencing hires you and says, "Okay, so what's your advice as a linguist? Should she ditch the low pitch voice, should she go back natural or should she stick with it? What's your advice for her now that she's in deep shit?"
Valerie Fridland:
Well, if only I could be that helpful to someone who's in that deep of shit. But that's a really an interesting question because my advice to her, if I had heard her talking in her deeper voice in a context where it wasn't so widely publicized, my advice to her on a witness stand would be probably for her not to even testify at all, but it would be to be natural with your voice and to have a higher pitch voice, because a higher pitch voice is considered more vulnerable and I think jurors might react more favorably to it.
Just if you look at how those higher pitch voices, they're also considered for women in particular, or a higher pitch voice, I mean, it's definitely not true for a man so I wouldn't give him this advice, but women with higher pitch voices are generally perceived as more attractive and more vulnerable, more submissive.
And so, in that trial, I think her argument was that she was being pushed into doing it by her boyfriend at the time, that he was really the mastermind behind it all. And so, if you're going with that play, then coming across as submissive and vulnerable is probably to your benefit. From a purely mercenary position, if I'm hired by the defense team, that would be the advice I give them. It's interesting because actually, linguists are often hired by defense teams, by prosecutors in trial.
I have actually testified as an expert witness in court cases before. I've done some forensic linguistics as well. I feel a little dirty doing it sometimes because you know what the people want and you have to go with what's true as a linguist, and it just feels like people might think you're for sale, which I think is not true of almost every forensic linguist I know.
They're very dedicated to their craft and their skill as a linguist, and they wouldn't lie on the stand. But that is a field actually, because people do want analysis of speech and they know there is research that suggests how people come off and people do find a distinct difference in the way that they're reviewed. My advice to her would be definitely to go with her natural or higher pitch voice during that trial.
Guy Kawasaki:
I promise you, if I get arrested in Hawaii, I'm going to revert the pigeon.
Valerie Fridland:
Very smart move. Very smart move. However, if you don't get arrested in Hawaii, that's probably not the way to go.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, right. My last question, it has to do with ChatGPT and AI, which in text written form can produce absolutely grammatically perfect text and we're not far away from it producing perfect vocalism too. What's going to happen to language in a world with AI?
Valerie Fridland:
Well, I think that's of course the hot button question these days. Again, it's a very different thing to have a computer that's doing it in text versus spoken assistance. When you call those lines and you get the endless buttons, press three, right now, we get frustrated because those virtual assistants suck.
They're not very good at understanding you. They're not very good at responding you to in a natural way. I think we're on the cusp of that being completely revolutionized with ChatGPT type technology based on large language models driving this.
My concern with these types of computational language models, these virtual assistants is that as a professor, obviously it concerns me for plagiarism, for basically taking from students the forced ability to think through things and do their own writing, but I think there are ways around that. From an interactive standpoint, I don't think it threatens us as people to have conversations with each other one-to-one or in business contacts on Zoom talking to each other, because those are cases where virtual assistants won't be doing the work we're doing. We get a lot of value from interactions. We get a lot of social value.
If you look at why babies don't learn language from TV or radio, it's not because they're not hearing language, it's because they're not having interaction with language and how would that be different than playing a virtual assistant with them? It won't, because what they learn from is the interactive nature of eye gaze, of touch, of emphasis, and those are things that you have to be a conscious being to do. I'm not worried about it replacing us in those ways.
What I'm worried about is that we're going to lose the empathetic humanness of interactions in service encounters. When I call, for example, American Airlines and my mother is dying and I need to get to her in twenty-four hours, what I'd get now is after an hour on the phone with virtual assistance, I might get through to a real human and they can have empathy, they can understand the emotional content of what I'm saying and respond back to me in that alike emotional sense that shows empathy, sympathy, and maybe even work with me, doing something that traditionally would be disallowed because they recognize the value of doing that as a human.
Well, virtual assistants are not going to do that. I think we're going to enter a phase of human computer interaction where we're going to very much miss that human connection. And it's going to change the way that we engage with people that are not in our close inner circle, so our neighbors, our friends, our family, we're still going to have interactivity.
But think about when you go to the store and I have a grocery store near my house that I go to a lot because I'm lazy and I don't like to drive anywhere to go to the grocery. If I need milk, I don't really care if it costs more in that place. It's convenient and it's small, it's easy, I run in.
Over the years, they've had the same staff and I've gotten to know them and I have these lovely conversations with them. I know about their lives, and a couple of them when I was pregnant with my child, they were pregnant with their child.
And so, we have this human connection and it makes going to that grocery store more pleasant for me because who wants to go grocery shopping? No one. But if you have this interaction and this human emotion, you have connection. That is something we're going to lose when you go through a grocery store. I don't know, Whole Foods here now is already mostly digital.
There's one person that you can flag down if something happens, but who enjoys that interaction? None of us.
I mourn the loss of that kind of connection, because for me, that's what language is about. Am I worried that it's going to reshape the way that we humans talk to each other? I don't worry about that. No, I don't.
I think what we may value might change, but I'm not too worried about the impact of that on just the shape of language to come in our inner circles. How about you? I'm curious to think, because you work in that area, what's your thought?
Guy Kawasaki:
We use ChatGPT as a research assistant, not as a writer. If I'm writing a topic about what are the benefits of being envious, ChatGPT will give you five reasons. Maybe I thought of three and I'll grab the next two, not grab the text, but I'll grab the idea and rewrite it. I use it like that all the time. I also use it to replace online thesaurus because it can find synonyms just like thesaurus.com can.
I always use a phrase, they might talk about innovation, jump to the next curve. Go ice harvesting to ice factory to refrigerator.
I would go to ChatGPT and say, "Give me another phrase for jump to the next curve." You can't do that with a thesaurus. You can do that with ChatGPT. But now, let me ask you this, really my last question, I promise you. Let's say the CEO of American Airlines calls you up and says, "Help us improve our virtual assistant." Would you say to him, well, let's say somebody calls up and says, "Can you upgrade me to first class?" You trained the virtual assistant to say, "Well, let me give that a look." By saying um with the pause, and let me give that a shot, do you think you could make virtual assistants "better"?
Valerie Fridland:
More human? I think they actually are. There are programs that do add that to the virtual assistant. I've heard, I think it's Google Assistant in fact does use ums and uhs. They've tested these models where they've had ones that don't do that versus ones that use things like discourse markers and fill pauses.
Actually, those are considered better communicators because we find that when we test people on speech without any of those things versus speech with those things that people tend to find the speech with those things more sociable. We'd miss them if they're not there. I think that that is exactly what models will do.
Interestingly enough, most of my graduate students over the past few years don't work as professors in linguistics because those jobs are one in a million these days. Most of them work for companies developing voice recognition and virtual assistants. I have students at Amazon, I have students at Google, that's really a prevalent employment for linguists who act as expert trainers to help improve the models based on what we know from linguistic research that humans do and how those things are construed.
In fact, people do call people like me up and do that. Some friends of mine who are also very senior linguists, I was going to say old people, but we're all senior linguists. We've been talking about forming a company to help these large language models do better work with their training data.
Because I think, as you probably know, there are lots of issues with the training data that are used for these large language models. One question, of course, is under-sourced languages and dialects are not adequately represented. That is something that people like me, socio linguists in particular, are very good at doing.
We have data just standing in our research labs with under-sourced languages and dialects. One idea is if we could connect researchers that use those data as sources for their research with companies that would need training data in those areas that we could actually make a good connection there and help support some research at the same time, we could also build better databases to be more adequately representative of those things.
But the other thing is to actually also help eradicate bias that those training data have, because we know the research that looks at co-allocation, for example, which is where two words come together and they're more frequent. Co-allocates are often biased in the direction.
If you have doctor, the word doctor, more often in training data, just from a historical perspective of the type of training data they use, more often in that training data, a pronoun like he would co-occur with a word like doctor. For a hairdresser, it would be more often a pronoun like she will co-allocate. That's just a natural bias in the data because of social historical context. But what if you could equalize that training data so that you had an equal number of those different situations?
Then when ChatGPT is doing this predication of what the next word would be, which is my understanding of how it operates, it's doing a predictive modeling, it would equally predict a he or she in that context and get rid of the training bias. There's a lot I think that a linguist actually can do to help make those models better.
Guy Kawasaki:
Then, ChatGPT will be banned in Florida because it's woke.
Valerie Fridland:
That's probably true. Well, I don't know. Is equal the same thing as woke? Well, then they'll have different versions. They can have the Florida version of ChatGPT.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's right. The world is flat. Donald Trump is president.
Valerie Fridland:
Here's an interesting thing because I'm curious if you've had this experience, and maybe I know they just released the fourth version, so maybe it's better, but I was playing around with it and I was asking it the same questions I would ask my students, because I'm assuming that my students next semester, I'm not teaching this semester, but when I go back into the classroom next semester, I'm 100 percent sure that ChatGPT will be part of what's helping my students.
I think it, as you said, can be a research aid, but I wanted to see, well, if I ask with the questions that I send home my students with to answer in their journals, their daily journals that they do, what are the answers I will get and how correct are they? Because I'm assuming half of my students will go home and ask ChatGPT these questions and write down what they say.
I found that actually it was only correct some of the time. It did not actually give me the correct answers that it should have based on the type of data it had access to. Some of them were tricky questions like what are the phonetic correlates of, what did I ask it, of pharyngealization or something like that.
I said, what are the causes of this happening in speech? It instead gave me the outcomes of what happened. What are the examples of this? I wrote it back and I said, "No, those are the outcomes. What are the causes?" Then, it said, "Oh, yes, you're correct. Sorry, here are the causes." Now, I know it because I knew the answer, but my students won't know that. In your research, how do you crosscheck it? How do you know that it's right?
Guy Kawasaki:
How about on the first day of class, in the first assignment you say, "Okay, these are the questions." Right in the class, you type it into ChatGPT and you say, "Okay, so this is what ChatGPT is going to say if you took this home and did it, and then you'll understand, holy shit, she already knows what it's going to say. I got to figure out a better way."
Valerie Fridland:
Well, hopefully. I'm less worried about that, about my students using it because a lot of my stuff I have my class do is things they have to do with their own active imagination and ChatGPT is not going to help them there. But my worry is that they won't know when they're using it as a research aid, what's correct and what's not.
Because when you go look up in a book, you can probably have a pretty good idea in that textbook or that original research article that it's giving you the correct information in terms of what you're supposed to tell me. But when you just type in ChatGPT for it to do that work for you, you don't know that as a student whether it's correct or not. That's the bigger question. I was wondering, in your own personal experience, have you found it to be incorrect and the things that you've asked it to research?
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I did one test about sixty days ago, and I asked ChatGPT, "Is Steve Jobs a college graduate?" It said, "Yes," and I know he's not. Then, I just asked this last week and it said no, he attended Reed College, but he did not graduate. Somehow it got fixed. But in this book I'm writing, I use a lot of quotes and a lot of examples of this is what Justin Timberlake said in an apology. He had a lot of practice or Bill Clinton, I got a lot of those quotes.
Then, Madisun checked each one to be sure that ChatGPT is not just making up and I'm attributing a quote to Justin Timberlake that he never said. Some of it, we had to throw out actually.
Valerie Fridland:
Wow. Okay, Madisun, I need you. I need to borrow you. See, not all of us have a Madisun. This is the problem. What we really need is not ChatGPT. We need a Madisun.
Guy Kawasaki:
We need Madisun GPT. Yes.
Valerie Fridland:
Exactly.
Guy Kawasaki:
Listen, we've been going an hour and thirty-four. You may now be the longest-
Valerie Fridland:
Oh my goodness.
Guy Kawasaki:
... episode.
Valerie Fridland:
Oh my gosh. Hopefully, you can cut out that useless parts.
Guy Kawasaki:
Except you didn't say very many useless parts, if any. I want close with this one story. I am friends with a guy named Steve Wolfram. Maybe you've heard of him. He is a physicist and he invented a software application called Mathematica. He was the youngest MacArthur Fellow winner at eighteen or nineteen or something like that, and he got his PhD at eighteen or nineteen.
Anyway, when I talk to Steve Wolfram, I need to rest about four years because his conversation is just so intense and so deep and all that. I'm telling you this whole story, you Google or ChatGPT Steve Wolfram after we're over and you're going to see how high this praise is. I am telling you that you are the Steve Wolfram of linguistics.
Thank you for joining us on this episode of Remarkable People, where we had the pleasure of speaking with Professor Valerie Fridland for a very long time.
Her extensive expertise in linguistics, coupled with her passion for language, has made her a terrific resource for professionals, academicians, students, and podcasters. She opened up a whole can of worms regarding whether I should remove or keep filler words. If you have an opinion about this, please send me an email at guykawasaki@gmail.com.
I want to thank the Remarkable People team, Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff Sieh, Shannon Hernandez, Luis Magana, Alexis Nishimura, and Madisun Nuismer, the drop in queen of Santa Cruz.
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. Until next time, mahalo and aloha.
One more thing, I may slip into pigeoning this podcast from now on. I hope that's okay with you, bruh. No huhu, okay?