117: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking

0:00Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gorn. And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And today, we're getting enthusiastic about the science of beautiful writing with Dr. Julie Sedevy, who's a psycholinguist based in Calgary, Alberta,

0:32Canada, and the author of Memory Speaks and Linguophile. But first, this episode originally aired on Patreon a year and a half ago, but 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, and we thought we'd make it available to everyone as part of our annual unlocking of a bonus episode in the main feed. Which also gives us and everyone on the production team a mini-break that keeps making the show sustainable for us. If you'd like to listen to over 100 other more Lingthusiasm episodes that are bonuses

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2:29Hello, Julie. Hi, Gretchen. I am fulfilling a long-time fantasy of appearing on Lingthusiasm. It's so fun to have you since you're already a listener. Indeed. So before we get into stuff about your book, Linguophile, and your other book, Memory Speaks, let's start with the question that we ask all of our guests, which is how did you get into linguistics? I stumbled into it. So 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.

2:59And I was reading through course descriptions, came across this thing called linguistics, linguistics, and it made reference to grammar and other stuff that didn't sound overly interesting to me. But I thought if I'm going to be a writer, I probably need to know some of this stuff. So I took the class and from the get-go, I was utterly mesmerized. I think my experience was a little bit like, imagine you're a kid and you love bugs and you've spent your life watching bugs and being fascinated by them, but you don't realize

3:29you can be a scientist of bugs and that there is a science of bugs. And then suddenly you encounter this, you know, at the age of 18. So that's a little bit of what it was like for me just to realize that you can study this scientifically, systematically. And of course, one of the things that comes out when you start looking at linguistics is the realization 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

4:00the right tools. You'd had a lot of language experiences before discovering linguistics as a named phenomenon. I did. And I think that's what gave me sort of an orientation and an attunement to language and a desire to use it as a medium, as a writer. So 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

4:37Italy, and back and forth a bit, and then finally landed in Montreal, where I learned French as my fourth language, and finally English as a fifth language in kindergarten for the first time. Wow. So I really enjoyed the Montreal aspects of your writing because I also live in Montreal, and hearing some of the things that were like, you know, 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. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was a real lesson to me in observing some of the sociolinguistic aspects of language

5:13because it was very clear at the time, so this would have 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. Not the language of power in some ways. Not the language of power, and 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, and almost everybody sent their kids to English school because that was the language that would give

5:45you the greatest opportunities. And then the language loss came into effect very soon after we arrived. And so 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. That's right. Because the idea is that French is and should be the language of Quebec and that there is something to be defended there. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, we were, my family, my siblings and I were educated in English.

6:19I 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 and I still kind of sink into it as the language where I just relax. You know, it's sort of like kicking off your shoes, putting on your pajamas. That is Quebec French for me.

6:50And I noticed we were at a cafe before this and you were talking to people in French in the cafe, like totally switching back and forth between the two, as I also do, as a lot of people in Montreal do, even though you don't live in Montreal anymore. Yeah, well, to me, being in Montreal is the opportunity to speak French and to experience the pleasure of speaking French. And I really do just almost get a bodily sensation of, ah, when I get to speak French. So, yeah, I use it wherever possible, even when they speak English back to me because they

7:21detect that that's not my strongest language. I really kind of push back and want to continue in French. So, you took an ancient linguistics course, fell in love, and decided to become a linguistics professor. Yes. It's that easy, right? Not on the spot. It was more like a seduction, I think, into linguistics. So, linguistics had to buy you dinner first.

7:48It very quickly bought me dinner and then some. Yeah, it was a pretty short courtship. I did switch my major rather quickly, I think, after that first linguistics course. And certainly by my second or third year, I had the feeling that this was something I was going to continue in and go to grad school and want to study. And how did your particular area of linguistics court you? Oh, yeah. So, psycholinguistics is what drew me. You know, it's so interesting to me to think of psycholinguistics as a sub-branch of linguistics

8:23because 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 subfield of psycholinguistics tends to be very experimental in its approach. So, 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? And I think what drew me is that that was the area where you could kind of see language

8:53in action in real time. So, 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, we're going to kind

9:26of break a little bit. Do you have an example of one of those types of failures you try to get people to do in the lab? Yeah, yeah, sure. So, at the time there was a lot of focus on the problem of ambiguity. So, 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. You can only recover it through memory.

9:58You're trying to constantly keep in memory the parts that are no longer present in time, trying to anticipate what's coming. So, in a sense, you're playing this game between memory and anticipation and prediction. And 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,

10:29cancer, any one of many, many words. And it turns out that people are very quickly trying to predict or make guesses as to what is unfolding at them. So, 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, you know,

11:01a Canadian flag and a candle and a candy or something on the screen, and then you can see, like, where they're looking and what they're thinking when they're doing that. Yeah, exactly. So, 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. And then another way that ambiguity rears its, I'm not going to say ugly head, because I think it's a rather interesting head. Yeah, I think ambiguity is very beautiful. Like, it's so cool that things can mean so many different things, and yet we mostly do

11:33understand each other. Yeah, exactly. That's what I found absolutely riveting. But you also see it at a level of sentences. So, 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. So, those are two very different structures underlying that first part of the sentence, and you don't necessarily know how that's going to continue. So, these kinds of sentences we call very poetically garden path sentences, because you might think

12:05that they're proceeding in one direction, and then suddenly you're yanked off the path that you're on, and you realize, like, whoops, that hit a wall, and now I have to retrace another line. So, 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. So, you can bring people into the lab and sort of give them a sentence like, one of the

12:36classics 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? And you have to sort of 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. And you can, you know, again, do eye tracking and see where do people's eyes jump back to the earlier portion of the sentence to say, oh, I'm reinterpreting this now. That's right. Or you can just see how long are people spending time reading a surprising continuation of a

13:09sentence. Versus an expected one. Versus an expected one, exactly. And 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. And, you know, these are some of the ways that we have used to build our theories. Yeah, and so you were doing psycholinguistics, your professor at Brown University in the U.S., and then now you're a writer. How did that come about? Well, yeah, so I guess that ambition of being a writer never fully left me.

13:43It was a little bit sidelined or suppressed. You know, I always had the thought that after I got tenure, I would then be able to write other books, you know, not necessarily the books that you write as a researcher. Well, that's delusional. At least it was for me. Maybe there are 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.

14:15So for me, it was just not something I could do in parallel. There's a lot of stuff like, you know, marking papers and, you know, doing all of that administrative work of being a professor, which is a lot to do. And running a lab is like running a small business. And 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. And there's that kind of pressure and sense of responsibility. So I just felt that I could not in good conscience kind of come in and out of that lab work, you

14:46know, if I decided I wanted to flit off for a couple of years and write a book. And you have graduate students to whom you're responsible as well. Yeah. So it came down to a choice. The tipping point was going on sabbatical for a year and realizing that there was still this draw of wanting to write and sort of prompted a whole reevaluation of my life. And I started gradually transforming myself into the kind of writer that could write the books that I wanted to. So how did you take that first step out to writing things beyond, you know, textbooks or

15:18research monographs? So what happened is that on sabbatical, I was working on a book that I was co-writing with Greg Carlson on language and advertising. And this came out of a class that we had jointly developed when I was a graduate student at the University of Rochester. And we decided we would write this up as a book for a general audience. And, yeah, that just put me into the pleasure of writing. And it was a little bit of a gateway book for me. That book is now quite dated. Okay. So this was sold on language.

15:48This is sold on language. Yeah. And 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. How did you go about building up those skills? Writing short pieces for various magazines and outlets. It's writing a lot of unpublished poetry, actually, because that put me in a very different skill set. Yeah. 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.

16:21Yeah. That really focused on the aesthetics of language. And that was very important to me as a writer. 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. So I'm really interested to hear that you had this step of like, I'm going to go away and write a whole bunch of poetry to develop that aesthetic sense of language in addition to the linguistic analytical sense. Yeah, exactly. So scientific writing trains you in a particular style that serves the purpose of scientific

16:56writing, but it is different from literary writing. So, you know, literary writing values very highly a feeling of embodiment, a subjective point of view, where scientific writing tends to shy away from that, tends towards abstraction. As scientists, we are trained to be very abstract thinkers. And I think we forget how bizarre that is as a way of moving through the world and using language. So I had to kind of learn to disengage from that and learn the skill set of writers who are more grounded in experience, in observation, in detail.

17:31And then 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. Right. So, you know, there are sometimes good reasons why you want to be skeptical of a literary style of writing to get certain points across. 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, Linguophile, is that you have this genre of writing that's sort of

18:01partially memoir, where it's sort of 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. So there's this sort of back and forth that I'm never getting whiplash between the two. Oh, I'm so happy to hear you say that, because that took me a long time to figure out. And 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

18:33slip into that more scientific style of language and creating a piece so that the seams didn't show as much was definitely part of the process for me. Yeah, this is also one of the things that I sort of 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, like, it can still be beautiful, it can still be creative and expressive and really interesting and engaging.

19:07And so I had that meant that my writing had to be beautiful if I was going to write in something approaching that style. Yes, and energetic. Like, yeah, that is one of the things that Because Internet has, I think, so well is that that energy and spontaneity that comes through in the language that you're writing about. Which is something that I wrote 10 drafts of to sound this spontaneous, you know? I know. I know.

19:31So the writing process aspect, and when I was reading Linguophile, which is the new book that you wrote about sort of language throughout the lifespan, both like language in childhood and adulthood and old age and loss and things like that, I noticed that I was very like that the chapters were just running very smoothly through my fingers, through my eyes, and I was just, you know, propelled on to continue reading it and didn't feel like I was getting sort of 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 can be boring.

20:09I want to say it diplomatically, but like, it's really easy to write something that is of interest to like you and your friends and family and not super interesting to people who don't know you because that's a failed state of memoir. And then the failed 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. Yeah, exactly. And in a way, I think fusing the two helped me avoid the pitfalls of each one a little bit

20:44because 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. So the process of writing Linguophile was quite unusual for me, was a little bit different from my other work. I basically started with, I think, 12 chapters and each one I kind of just conceived of as at the beginning, a bucket that I would start with some psycholinguistic concept that began

21:17with early infancy and went through the lifespan. So the first chapter, for instance, deals with infant speech perception. How do infants begin to break into this river of sound and kind of pull out some of the patterns of sound and identify where word boundaries are? So that was the starting concept. And then that constrains what I choose from the memoir side. Right. So that you're not just kind of rambling on into the things that are fun for you to remember, but maybe not so useful for the literary project you're undertaking.

21:49Yeah, I felt very sort of held by the book in terms of what it was doing. And I also found that at a more granular level, your writing is very beautiful. And I wanted to ask you about that. Like, as a linguist, what does beauty in writing or in language look like for you? So I feel that it just really enriches my experience of it. So I want to tell you what happened to me one time when I was a young professor teaching linguistics.

22:21I 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. And 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.

22:52If anything, it enhanced it. So once you know how intricate language is from the inside, I feel that you are just more attuned to things like the mouthfeel 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.

23:23Understanding 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. So I'm thinking about an artist or a sculpture, kind of 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 lifelike sculptures or drawings or sketches or things like that because you've actually examined from life in this more detailed way.

23:56Whereas if you're sort of 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 sort of 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. Yeah, absolutely.

24:27And it also extends your toolkit. So 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, hmm, why can we say X and we can't say Y? And that just gives you an awareness of the range of structures that are out there in language. Whereas, you know, day to day, we tend to use a much narrower set in our regular lives, right? I also am struck by how visual artists often study the visual perception system. So they'll

25:02study how color perception works or how perception of perspective works and use that as, you know, 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 like, wait, what? A disorienting feeling that is not nice, that's not achieving anything that you want to achieve as a writer. I find that one of the things that I often end up doing when I'm revising a text or when I'm editing

25:34someone else's text is saying, okay, so you've listed three things here. You've said, you know, this is this, this is this, and this is something else. And the things that you've listed, one of them is like a noun, one of them is a verb, and one of them is something else, a prepositional phrase or something like this. And 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. And you don't notice necessarily impressionistically when you're

26:06reading 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, ooh, this, I don't quite know what's going on in the sentence, it's kind of clunky, or it's kind of, it's slowing me down in a way that I don't understand, which to go back to doing eye tracking studies is saying, okay, when do people backtrack? When do people slow down? What makes them slow down? Oh, I can actually have an answer to that. Exactly. And I, in fact, often when I am editing my work or someone else's work, I have an intuitive

26:36sense of exactly what the eye is likely to be doing in that particular sentence, because I have conducted a number of experiments. Have you ever done any eye tracking studies on your own works, or are these sort of two different areas of your life? These are two different areas. I do not have a portable eye tracker in my home. They're pretty expensive. To get accuracy by the character. Well, you know, actually, the most simple programs that you could, you know what, I'm going to, now that you mention this, I'm going to actually look to see whether those teal tools are cheap enough

27:10to advocate for use for writers. Oh, wow. It would be so cool to use that in a writing workshop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to demonstrate to people, here is your original sentence, and here's what the eye is doing, and oops, here's a little wrinkle. Here's the part where the reader got slowed down or backtracked or didn't quite know what's, and maybe in some cases you want to create the effect of the reader slowing down or backtracking or something if you're trying to make them have a particular type of experience. Like, anything is, you know, good or bad, depending on what your goals are in that context.

27:43And 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. Yeah, actually, this is my new thing. I'm now going to do eye tracking for writers and editors. Because, you know, smartphone cameras are pretty cheap these days. Like, 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,

28:16but there's also a level of beauty at the sort of 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, ooh, 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 sort of Germanic or Latinate. And when I'm trying to make a sentence less convoluted, less overwhelming to process, I can say, oh, this sentence has a lot

28:50of Latinate vocabulary in it. Maybe if I made some of these words more Germanic, it would be easier 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. Yeah. And 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. Yeah, more vowels in relation to the consonants, this type of thing. But you also

29:25pointed to, in Linguophile, specific sound trends that make some words sound more or less beautiful at a general aesthetic level. So 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. All right, Gretchen, let's see what you think of these words. I'm going to read the list. Okay. And then you tell me which one is the most beautiful to start. Luggage, liminal, withstand, tremulous,

30:05pulchritude, zoo. Zoo as in zoological gardens. Yes, that one. Okay. So we have luggage, liminal, withstand, tremulous, 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.

30:37That's why nobody uses it anymore. There's this clash of meaning and sound, I think. Yeah. It's very obscure. Like, it's satisfying to know, but it's terrible. And then the middle two are, what am I left with? Zoo and... Withstand. Withstand. Yeah, those are sort of towards the middle. So between liminal and tremulous, I would say slight edge towards tremulous, I think. Tremulous above liminal. Between zoo and withstand. They're both sort of subtly middling words. I think maybe I'm going to go

31:11with zoo. And then between luggage and pulchritude, they're both real clunky words. I think luggage is slightly less terrible, less hideous than pulchritude. What a... Oh. And notice that clunky is a clunky sounding word. Yeah. So from a sound level, from a phonetic level, like pulchritude and luggage and clunky, they all have like cuz and gus in them. Yeah. And that back consonant, uh. And that uh vowel. Yeah. Which we get in ugly and muck and yeah, lots of words that are really

31:47unpleasant. Yeah. Okay. Ugh. All right. All right. So there's a vowel consonant thing. I also feel like the uglier words maybe had more consonants in them. Yeah. They tend to bunch up the consonants, you know, which is not really great for my native language because Czech is well known for piling consonants together. That's... Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think like in the context of a language as a whole, how ubiquitous do we think these aesthetic judgments are? You know, there's really not that much study of them. That's, uh, I think a relatively new area

32:19of study. Yeah. There are definitely some patterns that seem to hold across languages. Some sounds that seem to evoke similar concepts across languages. So the e vowel is associated with delicate things, light things. Small things. Small things. Exactly. Whereas the o and a sounds tend to evoke some heft. Larger things. 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

32:52beautiful. So what do we have there? So the L and M sounds are known to be pleasing, which may explain a little bit the title of my book, Linguophile, A Life of Language Love. The live, laugh, love of language books, unfortunately, perhaps. Yeah, 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 judgments of beauty seem to be somewhat stable. We don't really have a good sense of

33:26why that is or what function that's serving. And to be fair, like L, M, you know, some sort of K, G sound, uh, like O, these are all very common in basically every language. Like there's, these are all very common sounds that are found in a lot of places. And it's for... But they're not necessarily the most common sounds. Yeah. And there is, to some degree, that like language aesthetic judgments are also very much wrapped up in our judgments of who's the type of person who speaks that language.

33:59Like 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. Yes. Because English speakers don't think the same things about like Dutch or French, which have many of the same sounds. That's right. And, you know, in fact, to me, German is a very beautiful language. Yeah. I guess I have very early associations. It was one of the earliest languages I was exposed to. And I find it quite lovely. And I never understood what people were talking about when they described

34:30it as guttural and, you know, just full of abruptness and ugliness. I think it's a very monofluous language. I think it is as well. And 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 voice sounds like B and M and G have a certain lightness to them that's like reflected in voicing versus not voicing. And German has these de-voiced consonants at the end of words that make it

35:03sound very light to me. Yes, that's that's a good observation. I had this observation between Finnish and Estonian or Finnish has a lot more voiceless consonants than Estonian does. Oh, OK. And otherwise, they're very related. And I had this sort of aesthetic sense that Finnish felt like lighter to me than Estonian. I don't understand either of those languages, but I was visiting those countries and I had this sort of interesting aesthetic judgment that you can get about languages you don't understand. Yeah, that's interesting. And one place where there have been some some studies that look at the links between sounds and feelings or meanings is in studies of brand names. So you

35:40make up a word for a product and you say, you know, which sounds lighter, ziv or sieve, these kinds of binary distinctions. And it 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. And then it seems faster or slower or larger, more impressive. Yeah. One of the things I think about a lot when it comes to writing advice is that a lot of times

36:15when you read books about like, here's how to write from someone who's a famous writer, but doesn't have any training in analyzing language, they'll make the give advice that they then contradict themselves. So you see writing advice books saying things like avoid the passive and then in the very next sentence, they'll use a passive. And so there's a temptation to maybe say, OK, well, there's no 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

36:46think about it too hard level, like just consume a bunch of aesthetically pleasing language, whatever that means to you, and then you'll naturally sort of produce it. But as linguists, I find that a little bit unsatisfying because surely we can actually analyze language and we can actually analyze, OK, what's going on in this sentence that makes people feel bored or makes people feel excited or interested? How do you balance this? So I think there's a whole industry waiting to launch that is basically trained linguists who

37:18are 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, OK, 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, you know, I would give writers advice along the lines of use syntax that

37:49doesn't unpleasantly or without purpose create processing difficulty or a processing hitch. If you're going to introduce complexity into the sentence, it should be doing some work for you. So either in creating a delightful surprise or detour from expectation that is pleasant as opposed to unpleasant or maybe shifting the focus of attention on a particular portion of the sentence. So, for example, the passive is wonderful for this, right? You use it as a device for putting forward into that spotlight

38:22of the sentence the thing that you want someone to focus on. So if we say, as an example of the passive, I could say, I interviewed Julie Sedevy on Lingthusiasm. And then in the passive, it would be Julie Sedevy was interviewed on Lingthusiasm, and maybe I'm not even in this sentence, or maybe I'm sort of backgrounded. And depending on who is the focus of the conversation, who's writing the post on social media, you know, I might say I interviewed you, but you might say I was interviewed, depending on who we want. We want to focus on ourselves or what

38:55we're trying to highlight in the rest of the paragraph or something like that. It can be a very effective way of sort of keeping the topic consistent across every sentence. That's right. Yeah, exactly. And then there are manipulations of the sentence that you can use to really create unusual structures that do really wonderfully interesting things. So one sentence that comes to mind, I'm not going to remember the author of this sentence, but I love the sentence. The sentence is, vermin he called his critics. Oh, and that has a very different feel than he called his critics vermin.

39:27Yeah, it's really getting your attention. And it's suddenly more unusual structure, as you said, like, it's not as common to say, like, vermin, and you don't know what's happening after that. That's right. Yeah. So that's an example of complexity that's doing some clear work that is, you know, goal directed. So that's one piece of advice. And 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. So that's, I mean, I think you could teach a whole

40:00segment of a course on that concept alone. One of the other things that I found has been useful for my linguistics training is when, especially when writing is a negotiation. And so like edited writing 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. And 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

40:32with someone else about that, it's helpful to have the shared vocabulary. And so, you know, I've had some really fantastic editing experiences with helping to refine like, okay, I don't think you're actually making this point as clearly as I think 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. And my linguistics training gives me the confidence to push back against that and sometimes and say, well, if I was doing it this way, I'd 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

41:04to do this particular thing rather than saying like, oh, well, you must know better. Therefore, I need to immediately say yes to whatever edit someone else is making. Yeah, 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. And they often rely on rules of thumb or a consistency, right? This bugaboo of consistency. So I often have editors try to do things like eliminate needless words, which is one of those rules

41:36that you're supposed to follow. But if the word really is needless, like what is needless? Well, that's just it. And it can vary within the same structure. So to give a couple of examples, let's say we have a sentence like, Marissa said the prize was funded by dirty money. Okay. So if I wrote, Marissa said that the prize was funded by dirty money, we can drop the that. Yeah. And quite happily say, Marissa said the prize was funded by dirty money. That's a needless word. Sure. We can eliminate that. But now let's suppose the sentence was,

42:10Marissa claimed that the prize was funded by dirty money. Ah, because then Marissa could be claiming the prize for herself, not making a claim about the prize. And that really helps us disambiguate there. Exactly. So you run into one of those garden path walls there. If you don't have the disambiguating word, that is actually doing a fair bit of work. And 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 vats. Exactly. And I think that's where rules like, you know, don't use the passive come from, because there

42:47is 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. And 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. And because people don't have a sense of think about whether it's necessary, they don't have the tools for thinking about, OK, is it necessary? Is it useful? Is it doing what I want here? So that's where linguistics can really come in and fill that gap, I think.

43:18Yeah. 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. Like, there are so many different ways of being a person who uses language than I had realized before I was exposed to it from the linguistics perspective. Can you say a little bit more about that? Like, even thinking, OK, there are all these sounds that can exist in languages, but there's not an infinite list. Like, linguists have made a list of them, and that's sort of the

43:52number of sounds that we're aware of. Or, you know, sign languages have a fully-fledged grammar and different ways of relating to each other. Or there are some languages where the verb goes at the end of the sentence, rather, or some other languages where it goes at the beginning. And there's more ways that language can be than just the languages that I'd previously been exposed to. Right. Yeah. The variety of ways of expressing a thought. Yeah, absolutely. It's fascinating, especially if you start working with those wonderful problem sets from non-Indo-European

44:23languages. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yet, they're constrained, right? So 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. Yeah. Like, 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. Yeah. You know, it's not some sort of abstract principle. It's actually that it's harder to move your

44:56tongue that way. Yeah, exactly. Or constraints of human memory. Exactly. These are the syntactic options available to you, but we don't go outside of that because are, you know, we just can't hold certain types of things in working memory. Yeah. 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? Yeah. So in a way, looking at the range of languages gives us a sense of the limits of

45:27being human, you know, how far we can stretch those varieties and also where those limits reach an end. And 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

46:00rescue 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. So it's really a study for how this form that we use interacts with other aspects of being human.

46:33For 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, and you can get access to transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com slash transcripts. You can follow at Lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get access to scarves with lots of linguistics patents on them, including IPA, branching tree diagrams, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch, like bold, boober, and kiki designs on a range of totes,

47:05shirts, mugs, and scarves at lingthusiasm.com slash merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo. I can be found at GretchenMcCulloch.com, and I'm on social media as GretchenMcCulloch.com on bluesky, at Gretchen.McCulloch on Instagram. My blog is allthingslinguistic.com, and 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, and her books are called Memory Speaks and Linguophile, A Life of Language Love. We'll link to an excerpt. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an

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