Transcript of The Nocebo Effect: Placebo’s Evil Twin & Weird Facts You Never Knew

Today on Something You Should Know. Need to solve a problem or come up with an idea? I'll tell you a great way to do it. Then, the nocebo effect— how your mind can often make you feel sick.

Classic example of this is something called medical student syndrome. Very often what you find is in the week they are learning about brain cancer, for example, a significant proportion of them might start to develop headaches.

Also, why no one is paying attention to you the way you think they are, and some fascinating facts about inventions and words you never knew that are actually trademarks.

So we all know Kleenex and Band-Aid and whatnot, right? But bubble wrap, same with breathalyzer, jacuzzi, rollerblade, super glue, windbreaker, zipper, and TV dinner, which were all originally trademarks as well.

All this today on Something You Should Know! A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call someday clothes. I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday I'll have a place to wear that. Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for 3 years. Vinted offers another possibility: sell it! Every day, people can sell clothes they're no longer wearing and make some extra money. And they've made the process pretty painless. Take what you don't wear, list it on Vinted. Listing is quick and simple, and when an item sells, Vinted creates the prepaid shipping label for you. And importantly, there are no seller fees on Vinted, so when you sell something, you keep everything you earn. I like this whole idea because instead of clothes just taking up space, somebody else gets to wear them and you get some money out of the deal. Your closet looks better too. I mean, everybody wins, even the closet. So maybe it's time to stop waiting for someday. Download the Vinted app for free and start listing with no seller fees so you keep everything you earn. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can You know those times when you're sitting around trying to come up with an idea or something and it's just not coming?

There's a simple strategy that can make all the difference. Hi, welcome. I'm Mike Carruthers. This is Something You Should Know. So when you're trying to come up with an idea or solve a problem or figure out what you're going to say, The natural instinct is to sit there and think harder, but you may be much better off getting up and taking a walk. Stanford researchers had people perform creative thinking tasks while sitting and while walking. Creative output increased by an average of 60% while people were walking. Surprisingly, walking on a treadmill facing a boring blank wall— That worked too. So, the benefit wasn't simply fresh air or interesting scenery. Even better, some of that creative boost remained after people sat back down. There's an important catch, though. Walking seems particularly good when you need lots of possible ideas or a fresh approach. It did not improve performance when people needed to find one precise correct answer. So, the next time you're staring at a problem and getting nowhere, stop staring. And take a walk. And that is something you should know. What if simply being told that something might make you sick actually increases the chances that you'll feel sick?

It sounds a little far-fetched, but there is solid research showing that what you expect to happen to your health can sometimes produce very real symptoms. Most of us have heard of the placebo effect, where believing a treatment will help can actually make you feel better. Well, there's a darker flip side called the nocebo effect. A doctor's warning, a list of possible side effects, something you read online, even seeing other people complain about their symptoms can sometimes convince your brain and body to experience those symptoms. And this isn't imaginary illness. These symptoms can be quite real. So how does your brain manage to do this? And how do you keep it from happening to you? Helen Pilcher is a science writer and former scientist with a PhD in neuroscience from London's Institute of Psychiatry. And she has some fascinating and frankly unsettling examples of just how powerful the nocebo effect can be. She's author of a book called This Book May Cause Side Effects: The Curious and Dangerous Power of the Nocebo Effect. Placebo's evil twin. Hi, Helen. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hi. Thank you for having me.

Sure. So help me understand a little better about the nocebo effect and how it differs from the placebo effect, which I think most people have heard of.

People are a lot more familiar with that. And that's when positive expectations, positive thoughts can have a positive outcome on your health. So we see that in clinical trials where people are given placebo drugs and they start to feel better anyway. Now, in those trials, something really weird happens, right? Because everybody gets given the same information. So, half of them are taking the drug, half of them are taking a placebo. Everybody gets warned that the drug they're taking might help, but maybe it will cause side effects. And they might get warned about side effects. And the really weird thing is, and this is the nocebo effect, is that when you warn people taking a placebo tablet that it could cause side effects, so things like headaches or dizziness or stomach pain, a lot of them go on and develop those symptoms. And the important thing here is that the nocebo effect isn't just confined to clinical trials, it's out there in the real world too. So wherever we have thoughts, about the way an illness might play out, about a symptom that we're worried about, the nocebo effect is at play. So it's basically when we have negative thoughts or expectations about a symptom, about a health condition, and that kind of taints our response to what happens in a negative way.

Does that kind of make sense?

Sure. So it seems that the same thing is happening. The placebo effect and the nocebo effect are kind of the same thing.

So kind of like one is sort of the light and one is the dark, if you like. Let's think about it in the real world. So in the real world, if a doctor gives you a real tablet and tells you it's going to help, this is going to do great for you, and you start to feel better, well, some of that improvement is down to the pharmacology of the drug. It's down to the active ingredients that are inside it, the medicine. But part of your improvement is down to the expectation that you believe in the doctor and you believe in the drug. That's the placebo effect, okay? So the placebo effect is part of every drug we take, a small part, but it's part. Now imagine that same doctor says, I'm going to give you this tablet, it's going to be great, okay? Your chronic pain will improve. However, there is a possibility that it might, uh, I don't know, cause constipation or make you feel a bit dizzy. Now, just by giving you that information, your doctor has now made it more likely that those symptoms will happen. And when they happen in that context, often they're not caused by the drug, but by your expectation.

And a concrete example of that is that during the COVID pandemic, when they were testing out all the vaccines, they did all these huge number of trials. And they were able to pick apart the influence of the nocebo effect by looking at the side effects that people got when they were taking the vaccine in the trials, and the side effects that people got when they were taking the placebo version of the vaccine in the trials. And what they found is that after the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine, the very first one that was authorized, after the first dose, 70% of the common side effects that people experienced were not down to anything inside the vaccine. They were caused by the belief that it would make you feel quite unwell. And if you think back to that time, certainly here in the UK, people were really nervous and anxious about having the vaccine. You know, it was kind of like the first time we'd had this, we're in the middle of a pandemic. And what I'm saying here is that that collective belief that this vaccine might make us feel a bit unwell in the short term actually caused that to happen.

And what's going on to cause that to happen?

Well, so this is the curious thing. The nocebo effect works in various different ways. So one is that it is caused by conscious expectation, ideas that you can chew over and think about. Conversation with my neighbor, she has the vaccine before me, she says, Do you know what? I felt really, really rough afterwards for a couple of days. That's planted the expectation in my brain and made me more likely to get those side effects too. However, these things can also happen unconsciously outside of our awareness when our brains subconsciously make a link between 2 things that aren't necessarily related. And let me give you a concrete example of that to bring it to life. So, we know that when people who have cancer have chemotherapy, it causes some truly dreadful side effects. The nausea that they experience is a very, very physical reaction to the drugs they are taking. The chemotherapy drugs cause dividing cells in their stomach to die, and that causes nausea. There's a physical explanation from the drug. That's a standard regular side effect caused by physical processes. Now, Let me tell you, 25% of people who are undergoing chemotherapy start to feel terribly nauseous before the treatment happens.

So, this could be when they're in the waiting room, when they're waiting to have the cannula put in, it can be on the way to the hospital. And when those symptoms are happening before the drug's been anywhere near them, it tells you that something else is going on. And that's the nocebo effect. So their brain has quietly learned to associate things to do with the experience of chemotherapy, the trip to the hospital, for example, with the side effects that it subsequently causes. And the important thing here is that if we can get a handle on this, and if we can recognize it when it exists, it's telling us there's a portion of our ill health, a portion of our symptoms, that is caused by the complex interaction between our minds and our bodies. And if we can get a grip on that, if we can understand it, it then gives us a chance to do something about it. So this is the important thing. I think the nocebo effect is really a fundamental part of all human illness and disease. And by recognizing this and by studying it, we can actually find ways to be less ill, than we are.

I think this is kind of like the missing piece of the jigsaw in human health.

So it often happens when people, for example, they go listen to a talk by some doctor about some illness, they start to think, oh, maybe I've got that. Maybe, you know, when you're saturated by information about something about the human body, people will start to think, oh God, I might have that. Is that part of this or not?

Very much so, right? So everything that I have explored when I've been investigating the nocebo effect has been based in science. I have combed the literature looking at the studies that people have done. And basically, it's incredibly easy to make people experience symptoms just by suggesting them to them, which is basically what you're saying. So, you bring a bunch of people into a lab, you put an electrode, you tape it to their finger, it's hooked up to a fancy machine, you tell them when a green light flashes they're going to feel a little electric shock to their finger, and it all seems very plausible. And then the green light goes and they feel the shock to their finger. They feel the pain in their finger. Only in this experiment, they never actually—

Feel it.

switched the machine on. They never delivered an electric shock. The mere suggestion of it created pain in their fingers. If you bring a load of people into the lab, and they're students, and you give them a fake dummy pill, and you go, you know what, I think this could cause dizziness, or headaches, or nausea, or fatigue, people very, very, very often experience these symptoms. So we're very, very suggestible. And what I'm saying here, and this is a really, really important point, is that people aren't imagining these symptoms. These are real. These are genuine experiences. Classic example of this is something called medical student syndrome. So when medical students are, you know, going through the rotations, the different specialities, and they're learning about different diseases, very often what you find is in the week they are learning about Brain cancer, for example, a significant proportion of them might start to develop headaches in the week they're learning about cardiac problems. Some of them might experience breathlessness.

So I'm wondering, how do you bulletproof yourself to whatever extent you can from the nocebo effect? And I want to ask you about that when we come back.

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I'm speaking with Helen Pilcher, who is author of the book This Book May Cause Side Effects: The Curious and Dangerous Power of the Nocebo Effect, Placebo's Evil Twin. So Helen, this is about expectations. So what, how do you fix it? Because you expect what you expect. Once you expect something, you can't stop expecting it. So, so, so what?

One of the really, really cool things is this thing called attention to variability. So we have, let's take chronic pain as an example. Maybe chronic back pain is a good example. So when somebody has chronic back pain, The tendency is to create this narrative for yourself that you are always in pain, that it's always awful, and that's a terrible, terrible weight for people to carry. But what people have shown, and this is a technique called pain reprocessing therapy, is that if you can persuade people to notice the bits of the day when the pain is not quite as bad. If you can get them to notice that there is variability, this then starts to kind of reset the brain's predictions and dial the pain down. And let me kind of like explain that to you a bit. It's quite abstract. Let me explain that to you a bit better. So there are studies that have been done where people with pain from osteoarthritis, they were sent prompts on their mobile phone at random intervals during the day asking them to rate their pain. So it was completely random when they thought about their pain, and what they realized was that their pain wasn't always a 10.

There were parts of the day when it was slightly better, and the more they paid attention to this variability, the better their pain got, because it started retraining the brain to predict periods of wellness. And this, this is something that I I tried myself when I was kind of recovering from surgery and I had bouts of pain. And the way I kind of describe it is that instead of always looking at the clouds in the sky, start to notice the bits of blue in between them. And when you do that, when you very, very deliberately turn your attention towards the parts of the day that are better, you start to improve the portion of your suffering that is caused by the nocebo effect. And studies have shown that that can make, for example, meaningful differences to the amount of pain that people have in their lives.

So you mentioned that, for example, medical students will listen to a talk about brain cancer and start to feel headaches and things, but nobody gets brain cancer from thinking it so.

No, right. And let me be quite clear about this. Like I said, I am not trying to undermine the standard medical model. We know that cancer is caused by genetic mutations. Thinking negative thoughts cannot give you cancer. Thinking positive thoughts will not cure you. I would never want anyone to turn away from the standard treatments that are offered for cancer because they have the biggest weight of evidence behind them.

So there's a thing I notice about some people. I'm sure you know people like this. They take a lot of medication. They kind of— I wouldn't say they've given up, but they've kind of bought into the role that they're a patient, that they're sick, that they've got a lot of problems. Is that part of this? Like, is that part of the expect— if you expect to be sick, you're going to be sick.

To a degree, yes. Yeah. I mean, what we know is that the nocebo effect kind of makes a difference to how we feel subjectively. And then also, it can potentially bring about objective change in our bodies at the level of cells and molecules and organs and systems. But if you consciously go back to the doctor going, do you know what? That last painkiller you gave me, it didn't work. And you're on like your 6th prescription, and you're gonna try something new, and you walk in there going, but nothing works. Guess what? It is more likely that nothing will work. And we talk about this concept of a sick role. And I think really, that's something that we need to look at very, very carefully. And it's very much about switching people's mindsets and looking for the bits of blue sky in their stories and getting them to grasp that and turn that sick role around.

Yeah, exactly right. Because if you— if your expectation is nothing's gonna get better, then you won't do the things that could help you get better.

Right. So at the behavioral level, sure. If you've decided to kind of give up, you are less likely to exercise, you are less likely to eat healthily, you might be more likely to smoke. And there's those behavioral things that will create a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're more likely to slide psychologically and feel less well. But what the research also shows is that this can have an effect on your biology. So that if you are negative and down and stressed, that could affect the amount of cortisol that you have flowing around in your body, the stress hormone. That could affect the activity of the immune system, and that could negatively affect your health through biological mechanisms too.

So you write about it, and I'd like you to quickly tell the story of Sam Shuman.

Sam Shuman. I heard about Sam Shuman 20 years ago from one of the guys who was peripherally— he was a doctor, one of the guys who was peripherally involved in his treatment. And this story has stuck with me ever since. So this is back in the 1970s. Sam Shuman is a guy, he was diagnosed sadly with terminal cancer of the esophagus. And he was given 3 months to live. And 3 months later, he died. And that's kind of desperately sad, but not that remarkable. The remarkable bit came next. So, they performed an autopsy on him, and at autopsy, they couldn't find any sign of the cancer that was supposed to kill him. They found a tiny cancerous spot on his liver, but it was fairly inconsequential. It certainly wasn't enough to kill him. And they launched an investigation, and what they found out is that— and you have to remember, this is the '70s, so we didn't have MRI scans or CT scans, and all of our notes, all of the patient notes were on bits of paper stuffed into files. And what had happened is that somebody else's notes had got put into his file, and the doctor didn't notice, and Sam Shuman was given someone else's— Oh my God.

prognosis. And the doctor who I interviewed about this particular case said to me, he didn't die from cancer, he died from believing he had cancer. And that, if you like, is the thing that sparked my interest in the nocebo effect. You have to be careful interpreting it, right? Because this is one person. Maybe there was some other explanation. But I've spoken to lots of oncologists, and what they tell me is that very often, they see the decline of a cancer patient mirroring their psychology more than their biology. And so I think Sam Sheman is a, you know, a desperately sad and poignant story, but just blows my mind in terms of the power that the nocebo effect could potentially have.

But you would think if there was an autopsy that they would have come up with a true cause of death.

Well, the details have been lost to the mists of time. As I say, this was in the 1970s, so you can't get hold of these reports. All that was recorded was that he didn't have esophageal cancer. I'm not quite sure what they put down as his cause of death. And the physicians who treated him, all of them felt very, very strongly that the reason for his decline was the information that he was given. That basically put him into this state of prolonged hopelessness. And then his body followed suit. And that was the end of Sam Shuman.

And so what is it you want people to understand about this? What's the takeaway here?

The take-home message from all of this is always to focus on the positive and the things that bring you joy. And to dwell on your symptoms and go visit a doctor if you need to. But in between those symptoms bothering you, focus on the good bits in life. Do the things that bring you joy because the things that bring you joy activate those parts of the brain that are involved in the placebo response and they make you happy. So for me, that's the big, big message to come out of all of this.

You know, this so applies to everybody. I mean, how many times have you gotten a vaccine or a some sort of medication and heard about other people getting sick from it, side effects and all, and, and, and then you got sick from it. Well, was it really the medication or the expectation that you were going to get sick so you got sick? This has been very eye-opening. I've been talking to Helen Pilcher. She is a science writer and author of the book This Book May Cause Side Effects: The Curious and Dangerous Power of the Nocebo Effect. Placebo's Evil Twin. And there's a link to her book in the show notes. Helen, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.

You are so welcome. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. It's been a real pleasure.

There are all kinds of things you know without really knowing why you know. You use words and expressions without knowing where they came from. You encounter everyday objects, customs, and ideas that have strange histories you've never thought to question. And occasionally you'll hear a fact that sounds completely made up, except it isn't. Those are some of the rabbit holes we're about to go down. A lot of our conversation is about language, the strange origins of familiar words and phrases, but we'll also wander into history, science, pop culture, and some wonderfully odd corners of everyday life. My guest is Jess Zafarris. She is an author and language expert who has spent years digging into the surprising histories of words. Her latest book is titled A Miscellany of Weird and Wonderful Facts for Curious Humans Who Have Nothing Better to Do Than Read. And some of these facts are going to make you wonder how you got this far in life without hearing them. Hi, Jess. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hi, Mike. It's great to be here.

So I think a fun place to start would be words in our language that you probably didn't know are words that came from someone's name, like sideburns.

Yes, sideburns. That's a metathesis of Ambrose Burnside, who was a Civil War general. And there are a couple of alternate explanations here. One suggestion is that holding a musket up to your— the side of your face could potentially leave a burn and the hair was meant to cover it, or it simply looks like a burn on the side of your face. But every record we have of this word suggests that it was originally from the name of this Civil War general who had a flamboyant set of facial hair, this elaborate set of whiskers that made that facial hair popular, and then any hair on the side of your face. And it was reversed into sideburns, presumably based on a misunderstanding that it was connected to him in the 1870s. And then, uh, another one that we have is shrapnel, kind of in the same vein. Lieutenant General Henry Shrapnel was a British artillery officer who invented, you guessed it, exploding shells that scattered shrapnel around. Another interesting one, I think, is Franz Anton Mesmer, who was an 18th-century German doctor who claimed to heal people via animal magnetism, and he did dramatic trance-inducing treatments, including those that involved hypnosis, and he came to inspire the word mesmerize.

And boycott. I didn't know where that came— I never knew where that came from.

Yes.

Charles Cunningham Boycott was a 19th-century English land agent in Ireland who tried to evict tenants, and the community responded by refusing to engage with him in any way. And thus it became the same— our word for a modern protest tactic of avoiding buying something or engaging with some— with a brand.

I think a word you hear a lot today is the word dude, as in, hey dude, and it has a long and interesting history.

So the word dude is first recorded in the late 1800s as a word for a foppish or fastidious man. And dudes at this time were reflective of the aesthetic movement of the late 19th century, which championed pure beauty and art for art's sake. Many of the men that fell into that stereotype were high society city dwellers who lived in the American Northeast. They were Yankees who lived in big cities. And in fact, the word dude is thought to have originally been a shortening of Yankee Doodle. The British lyrics to that song were written to poke fun at American troops during the French and Indian War. And you'll note that Yankee Doodle is described as a dandy who is a fabulous dancer and wears a dashing feather in his cap. And doodle is thought to be from a German word meaning fool or simpleton. And dude is a shortening of doodle from that song.

But that's not what it Means anymore. I mean, everything—

no, it isn't.

Yeah, how did it morph into what it is today?

So Yankee Doodle, another aspect of this, he calls it macaroni because macaroni was also used as a term for men whose luxurious lifestyles involved wearing the latest and most outlandish styles and enjoying fancy foreign foods. Macaroni didn't quite mean the same thing as it does today. with regard to noodles, but it was a fancy foreign food. And written from a British perspective, the song, as I've said, poked fun at American soldiers in particular, who were portrayed as having more concern for their outfits and accessories than their skills on the battlefield. And in the 1700s, there was this group called the Macaroni Club, which was famous for reveling and indulging in foreign goods and apparel. They wore these towering wigs called macaroni wigs. Now, the way we shifted back to dude from this emerged from that macaroni style. In the early 1900s, dudes from the Northeast started vacationing in the American West, and the resorts where those city slickers stayed for their authentic Western experience were called dude ranches, which we still have now. And the way we use the term dude today as a word for any guy or any as a gender-neutral term, even in some cases, is thanks to 1960s slang from Black American communities, which then got picked up by students at universities in California and then across the country.

So the word factoid, which we use here because we have little factoids in our podcast, and I have no— I just assumed it's kind of like a small fact, like it's a little nugget of information. That's how we use it.

I think that's how most people It certainly is what that means now, but originally it was not a fact. Uh, it wasn't a small fact. It wasn't a fact at all, because it was coined in 1973 by Norman Mailer, who wrote about it in his novelistic biography of Marilyn Monroe. And he intentionally structured it using the ending -oid, which we also see in words like asteroid, which is a star— it's star-shaped, but it's not actually a star— or humanoid, which is used in science fiction. Sci-fi contexts to describe creatures or aliens that are shaped like humans but aren't necessarily humans from Earth. And he, he meant it to imply sort of the same thing that we use the term fake news for. It was a supposed fact in magazines and newspapers that had no basis in truth but were there to manipulate the emotions of readers. So it was a fact-shaped object. We've almost completely lost sight of its original sense, and I don't think there's anything wrong with calling a small fact a factoid now because that's simply how we use it. But I do love that William Safire, the writer behind the New York Times column on language, has suggested the word factlet to represent a piece of interesting information instead.

I was surprised to read about these inventions that are much older than I would have ever imagined. And can you talk about those?

Yes, this was really interesting. For example, I think the one that blew my mind the most was automatic doors. There was an inventor in the 1st century AD named Heron who had a number of inventions before their time, but the idea was that temple doors would open automatically when fires were activated and the heat generated steam that moved weights via pulleys and opened up the doors, which I thought was fascinating. Another interesting one I would say is contact lenses. Maybe not invented per se, but Leonardo da Vinci sketched concepts resembling contact lenses as early as 1508. The first functional ones are still older than you would think, and they were made of glass, which sounds horrifying, but they were made in 1888 by German ophthalmologist I think most people believe—

I've always believed that the flushing toilet is a fairly recent invention, but according to you, it's much, much older.

Oh, yes. Toilets with flushing mechanisms date back to 2500 BC, and there were a number of, like, brick toilets that were connected to flowing water systems. Those seem to have appeared in a few different civilizations as well. I believe ancient Arabic cultures also, or Arab cultures also, had flush toilets as well.

So let's switch gears here and talk about Chopin's heart, which I didn't know was a topic, but it obviously is.

This one was written by one of the contributors to the book. A fascinating story. I was delighted that she submitted It— her name is, uh, is Emily Hightower. She wrote about this. So Chopin, who's the, the composer and pianist, died in France, and while he was dying, he requested that his older sister take his heart to Poland. And it was removed, and it was preserved in alcohol, not formaldehyde, because that wasn't used at the time. And it was, uh, supposedly preserved in French cognac, but we don't know whether that's true. So his sister smuggled the heart out of France, She concealed it beneath her dress due to the political situation at the time, and, and perhaps because that would be a little taboo. The heart stayed at their family home in Warsaw until 1879, when the family requested to bury it at a local church, but they were refused because only saints were permitted burial in the crypts of the Church of the Holy Cross. Eventually, they reached a compromise. The heart would be placed in a column within the church where it remained undisturbed until 1944, when the Warsaw Uprising began during World War II.

A Nazi chaplain approached the reverend of the church and offered to take the heart for safekeeping, and the heart was entrusted to him. And soon the column and much of the church were destroyed. After the uprising, another officer decided that returning the heart would generate goodwill for the Nazis, so he orchestrated a— filmed ceremony to return the heart to the Archbishop of Warsaw. It was displayed on a piano before being removed to the Chopin family home, and it stayed there until 1951, where it was returned to the rebuilt Church of the Holy Cross. And in total, it traveled more than 1,000 miles in the years following his death.

Where is it now?

It is back in the Church of the Holy Cross. Oh.

So there are a lot of trademark names that have become very generic words, and most people know about Kleenex and Band-Aid, but there are, there are a lot of other ones that I am unaware of till now.

Yes, absolutely. So we all know Kleenex and Band-Aid and whatnot, right? But bubble wrap was originally owned by Sealed Air Corporation. I believe it still is. It was invented by 2 guys who were attempting to make 3-dimensional plastic wallpaper. I don't know why, but they were. And they failed, but they did make a useful packing material. Ping pong was first trademarked by British manufacturer J. Jacques and Son Limited in 1901, then bought by Parker Brothers, and then bought by Escalade Sports. The name ping pong, as in table tennis, did exist before that, and the term may have been used before the trademark, but it was trademarked for quite some time. Same with breathalyzer, jacuzzi, rollerblade, superglue, windbreaker, zipper, and TV dinner, which were all originally trademarks as well. There's a, there's a lot of controversy right now that you may have heard about. Velcro is really trying to get people to use hook and loop as the generic term for what Velcro does. It's hook and loop fastener, but I feel like a lot of people, I think they're losing that battle, honestly.

Yeah, good luck with that. Who's going to say that? But as I understand it, because I've read about this before, that companies really— you would think, well, our product is so successful, people use the name generically, but they don't like that, that they lose their trademark because it becomes a generic word.

They do, and it can— it ends up being just the word that everyone uses, and the trouble there is competitors can then also use that term once the trademark supposedly dies.

A lesser-known one, but I think it's still interesting, is moxie.

This word, you know, we use it generally, right? Is, um, you've got moxie, kid. That was originally a trademark as well, and it actually still is. And I don't think the trademark has died necessarily because of the way that we use the word. But from 1930, we've been using this term to say, you know, you have moxie. It means you You, uh, you're bold, you're, you're ready to take on the world. But it is originally from the name of a bitter syrup first marketed as the medicine Moxie Nerve Food in 1876, which was then sold as a soft drink starting in 1884. You can still get it. It tastes a little bit like root beer. The brand is probably originally— it probably gets its name from an Abenaki Native American word meaning dark water that appears in the names of some lakes and rivers in New Maine, but then that was applied to this medicine, which then turned into a soft drink in the 1800s.

Have you ever had Moxie?

I have.

I, I had it as a result of writing about it, as a matter of fact. I hadn't had it before because it wasn't sold where I grew up, but then I moved to the Northeast and it's, it's everywhere around here.

Here's an interesting topic that you write about that people probably don't think a lot about, and that is songs— popular songs, popular music that has been banned by some group or another.

Some of our more popular songs that are in the zeitgeist right now were challenged by religious and government institutions, like Like a Prayer by Madonna in 1989 was officially condemned by the Vatican. And although she had an— she was endorsed by Pepsi at the time, they canceled their endorsement because of the negative press she got from The Vatican condemning it. The Pope even asked people to boycott her. Um, I— though, one, you know, the topic of that song certainly makes sense as far as their reaction goes. Though I think that a lot of these institutions, when they, when they try to ban a song or try to encourage people not to listen to a song that probably has that sort of Streisand effect to it, you know, the Streisand effect is when you try to make something less popular and just draw more attention to it.

Right. Yeah. Who's going to— who's not going to want to listen to a song that the Pope has said you shouldn't listen to? I mean, yeah.

Another big one, I would say, that many people associate with pacifism, which fairly so, would be John Lennon and the Beatles' Imagine from 1971. It's a ballad about peace, but it was banned from many outlets during the Gulf War. And even post-9/11 for lines like, imagine there's no heaven, even though it's one of the most covered and quoted tracks ever.

There was one song you wrote about that I thought was interesting, was The Kinks, because the BBC wouldn't play their song because they have a ban on playing songs that had brand names in them.

Yes, this is actually one of my favorites because it's a brand affiliation thing. So the BBC wouldn't play songs with brand names in them for a while. So when The Kinks' Ray Davies sang that champagne tastes just like Coca-Cola in the song Lola, the radio, uh, threatened to ban it. So mid-tour in the U.S., he flew 16,000 miles round trip just to re-record the line as cherry cola. And both versions have been produced, so you might hear one or the other when you—

Well, since you are the language and word expert, give me one more word, interesting word, and the story behind it.

Okay, this is one of my favorite word stories of all time. I've probably mentioned this to, to anyone who's heard me talk about words before, but you know the word anti-disestablishmentarianism?

Yeah, I remember that, and it was like supposedly the longest word in the English language.

Yes, which it isn't. There are many longer ones. Most of them are scientific terms. Most of them have, uh, some of them are just silly terms. Like, uh, in James Joyce's work, there are extremely long words for the sound of thunder at the, at the dawning of creation. But anti-disestablishmentarianism is notable for being a particularly long word with a practical use that isn't scientific, and it isn't a compound that's made of like a medicine or, or a condition or something like that. So its original meaning, which you may not know, it pertained to 19th century Church of England politics. The establishment in anti-disestablishmentarianism was the Church of England as the state church. It was a pretty obscure word outside of British theology and politics. Until 1955, when 12-year-old Gloria Lockerman correctly spelled the word anti-disestablishmentarianism on the quiz show The $64,000 Question, and she immediately catapulted to fame. She was featured on The Martha Raye Show. She— they joked about the word on The Honeymooners as a result of her spelling it. And one of the reasons that she was particularly notable and gained so much fame is that it was the 1950s and she was Black, and she drew the attention of viewers who had preconceived notions about race.

Uh, she followed up the next week with an even more difficult spelling challenge. She correctly spelled the sentence, the belligerent astigmatic anthropologist annihilated innumerable, innumerable chrysanthemums, which, as you can tell, I can barely even say. And, uh, this made her the spelling queen of the airwaves, and she was awesome. She was honored by the NAACP. She ended up being on a bunch of shows. Unfortunately, she ended up sort of retreating from the public eye after some controversy around the $64,000 question came out, but I believe she became a teacher eventually.

Well, this has been fun. I, I always learn new and interesting things about words and other things every time I talk to you. I've been speaking with Jess Zafarris. She is author of the book, A Miscellany of Weird and Wonderful Facts for Curious Humans Who Have Nothing Better to Do Than Read. And there's a link to her book in the show notes. Jess, always a pleasure.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much for the opportunity, Mike.

You ever walk into a room full of people and feel really self-conscious about I don't know, your clothes or your hair or something embarrassing you just said, and you're convinced that everybody noticed. And chances are, most people didn't. We have a tendency to dramatically overestimate how much other people notice us. In one famous experiment, researchers made students wear an embarrassing Barry Manilow t-shirt into a room full of other students. The t-shirt wearers estimated that about half the people in the room would notice. In reality, only 23% did. It makes sense when you think about it. You are the center of your attention, so it feels as if you must also be the center of everyone else's attention. But they're mostly thinking about themselves. That's worth remembering the next time you stumble over your words or wear the wrong thing or make a minor mistake or, or just feel awkward walking into a room. Your embarrassing moment is probably much bigger to you than it is to anybody else. And that is something you should know. It takes a team of people to put this show together, and we have a great team. Jennifer Brennan, Jeff Havison are our producers, and Ken Williams is our executive producer.

I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.