Transcript of Why Secrets Are So Hard to Keep & The Curious Quirks of Language - SYSK Choice

Today on Something You Should Know, some important insight into how you view other people. Then, secrets. We all keep secrets, and they can cause us harm.

They can cause ulcers. They can cause, apparently, cancers. Certain cancers, or cancer can arise from the stress of keeping a secret. And it causes more harm than just stress. It's not just stress. There is something particular to the secret.

Also, are there animals who are truly monogamous? And interesting quirks about our language, like the letter A. It comes from hieroglyphics. Do you know what it represents?

An ox's head. When you write a capital letter A, that point at the top is the nose. The lines at the bottom, those are the ears or the horns. And the line that goes across, that was where the horns and the ears came out of. And you can do this with a lot of our letters if you trace them back through historical documents.

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Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hello, welcome to Something You Should Know. And if the subject of keeping secrets or not keeping secrets is fascinating to you, and I think it is to most people, you're going to find this episode really interesting. We start today though with eye contact. Some people have difficulty making eye contact while other people overdo it. So what's the norm? Well, it depends on the situation. In a group setting, 3 to 5 seconds is considered normal engaged eye contact. Keeping someone in your sights longer than that could be perceived as staring, especially if you're not the one who's talking. Less than that though, and we might think you're just not interested. In one-on-one situations, the gaze can last up to 10 seconds before we glance away. But you also have to factor in the time not looking. If you spend more than 50% of the conversation not making eye contact, that's risky. Because if you're spending too much time looking elsewhere, you can seem disinterested. And that is something you should know. Secrets are fascinating. Just about everybody has a secret. Or 2. We keep our own secrets, and maybe we hold on to secrets that other people have told us, but we're not supposed to tell anyone.

Well, why do they tell us if we're not supposed to tell anyone, knowing how hard it is to keep a secret? And why is it so hard to keep a secret? Do they weigh heavy on us? Is there some benefit, some relief when you unload your secrets? Well, it turns out secrets are studied a lot, and here to share what the latest research says about you and your secrets is Andrew Gold. He's an investigative journalist, podcaster, and filmmaker who has made and presented documentaries for the BBC and HBO. He hosts a podcast called On the Edge with Andrew Gold, and he is author of the book The Psychology of Secrets. Hi, Andrew. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Thank you so much for having me.

So first of all, what is a secret? What is your working definition of that word so we're all on the same page here?

I think I like to try and define a secret by what it's not. And there's 2 things that are very close to it that it is not. And one of them is privacy. And that makes a secret very much dependent on its time and place, because something that is private is something typically that is maybe accepted in a particular society. If you had a couple hundred years ago a certain number of slaves, this would have been considered private. If you had that today, that would be a secret because it transgresses societal norms. It would be completely insane. And so you would have to keep that secret because morally you would be judged were that to get out. Sometimes things that seem maybe less salacious on the surface are actually more secretive than private. For example, if a couple, um, has sex quite often, this is just a private matter. Uh, even if they have quite a lot of sex, it's private. So sex we think of as salacious— this should be a secret really— but it's not because you expect couples to have sex, or a lot of sex. Maybe that's a, a wrong expectation.

If a couple never has sex, that is actually a secret. So the boring one of, oh, we never have sex, that's a secret because it goes against— it runs counter to our expectations of couples, which is a problem, I think. I mean, it's something that is talked about to death, of course. Instagram and social media and the way we portray ourselves, the way we lie to our friends about how often— it doesn't have to be sex, of course, but whatever it is we're getting involved in, we lie and we make ourselves look good. And all that does is cause a great deal of shame in people who don't have that kind of life and feel they have to keep it secret, when, when really, you know, there's, there's a great spectrum of what is normal. There's no right or wrong, and that's really sad. Um, another thing, a secret is, is not necessarily is a lie. These are 2 slightly different things. Um, but all lies have, uh, secrets in them. The secret is the truth that the lie is not telling us. But not all secrets are lies. You don't have to lie necessarily to keep your secret.

So I guess I would just say a secret is an act that you commit, that you do, to withhold information that could see you societally ostracized or see your status drop in the eyes of the person you tell that secret to.

And why is it, if you know that somebody has a secret and you don't know what the secret is, but you know they're holding on to one, why does it become so important and so critical that you find it out?

Well, I think that comes down to our evolutionary biology, which I just find all this stuff fascinating, particularly. I mean, you and I are journalists, podcasters. We're trying to find a certain truth. People listen to us because they want that truth. And I'm sure that goes back to tribal times where those who exhibited curiosity would have done better in their tribes and survived to pass on their genes over hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years. more and more of us who survived, obviously, and passed on our genes were curious. We were also very gossipy. Initially, when we were in small tribes, we would groom one another as monkeys do to sort of socially bond. As we grew too large for that as a group, that became too time-consuming. There were just too many of us and we couldn't all be grooming one another. And so gossip appears to have filled that hole. And gossip became the social cohesion or the glue that held us together. So when you mix that gossip that held us together, this social cohesive glue, with the curiosity that helped us find new shelters and new food and all different lands and things like that, we became an incredibly inquisitive species.

And I love that because that is something that I don't know how you feel, but if I think about friends of mine or people that I admire, it's, it's not necessarily intelligent or funny or this or that. It's curious people, uh, people who are not concerned necessarily for societal norms. As I was saying before, they don't— they maybe flout them, uh, they, they constantly, they go, but why is this the rule? Why is this the law? Why this and that? Anyway, that's part of what gave us this great curiosity to get secrets out of other people. There is, of course, as well the sense in which secrets are a great mechanism for power, to keep power over other people. So we want to get secrets out of people to reduce any power they might hold over us. And once we have their secrets, we have power over them. So there are all sorts of dynamics going on that make us very curious and pretty desperate to get the truth out of people.

Does everybody have secrets?

Apparently so. Every person keeps— I can't remember the exact number. It's like 7 or 8 or 9 or 13, I think it might have been, secrets. secrets. And that seems crazy because we don't think of ourselves like that. Um, some of the secrets we keep, for example, might be a romantic secret. You know, you don't tell your lover that you actually prefer a different kind of position or something, or, or that you are attracted to somebody at work. There are all kinds of things that we keep down that you might not even think about it being a secret, but actually, um, actually they are. So we all keep them. And they have quite a dramatic effect on us at times.

What kind of dramatic effect?

They can cause ulcers. They can cause apparently cancers. Certain cancers or cancer can arise from the stress of keeping a secret. It's really quite a particular thing, and it causes more harm than just stress. It's not just stress. There is something particular to the secret that causes more harm to us. I think the reason for that is, again, going back to tribal times, a tribe that had individuals within it that were prone to keeping secrets, who could keep secrets without harm, without feeling harm, without feeling bad, that tribe would not do so well. Because ultimately, you need a mix of personalities, but you certainly need people who are going to be incentivized to share their food with you or to share where the best bit of shelter is or to help you in some sort of way. So it feels like there is a biological mechanism, which they call the fever model, that makes you feel bad when you're keeping something secret in a really unique way that very few other stresses cause you. So the thing with this fever model, it's a little bit like any fever that you might get. You know, the body makes itself uninhabitable for the virus, and obviously you suffer tremendously, but hopefully don't die, um, because then it's, you know, pointless, isn't it?

But the fever model, you know, does the same thing with secrets. It makes your body, uh, feel horrible. It makes you feel shame, and, and just terrible illnesses afflict you until you get that secret out, because it wants you to get the secrets out. It also wants to encourage you not to keep too many secrets, because if you do, you might get caught doing something you're not supposed to do and kicked out of your tribe.

So this idea that if you unburden yourself of your secrets, that that is somehow good for your health, this is proven science?

Yeah, that's right. That's absolutely right. Study after study, which are in the book, show people revealing their secrets, feeling better about it. One of the interesting facts is I think we thought for a long time, until recent studies have proved otherwise, sorry, We, we thought that it was the impact of having to lie to somebody. We thought it was like if you're cheating on your wife, it's, it's the trying to deceive her and not let her know that caused all of this stress. And they've come to realize— there's an excellent academic researcher called Michael Slippian who does a lot on secrets— and they've come to realize that it's not that. It is, it is just the rumination and the mind wandering, uh, during the day To your secret. That is enough in itself to cause you a lot of stress. It's, it's not the fact that you have to hide it from other people.

We're talking about secrets, the kind that everybody keeps, and my guest is Andrew Gold. He is author of the book The Psychology of Secrets.

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So Andrew, what about the kind of secret that you're keeping where there's really literally no chance? As long as you keep your mouth shut, there's no chance anybody's going to find out. Is that a harder secret to keep? Because you're not juggling anything, you just shut up and there's nothing to worry about.

Yeah. I mean, look, common sense dictates to me that you're absolutely right, that that should be easier to keep. But the research seems to show that it's the secret itself. That's what's really important. I mean, this was a 25-year-old woman who's a pedophile. Um, oh, she has the, the condition, or the whatever you call it. I don't know what you'd even call it, but she has the attraction, and she says she's never acted on it. Um, there's no way that, unless she doesn't act on it, that anybody could find out. But it eats away at her. I mean, obviously for other reasons than just the secret, the fact that you must feel terrible about yourself. But ultimately, it's the, the social stigma, or the— not the social stigma, the shame that you feel in the discrepancy between the self you show to the world and the real self inside you, particularly when it's wrapped up in your identity, is what makes secret keeping so difficult. But the studies seem to show that it is the actual act of having the secret rather than the act of having to keep it from other people. Just having that secret is what causes the most stress.

You know how you see on those TV dramas, you know, the interrogation of the suspect, and they say, you know, you're going to feel so much better when you just tell me the truth that you, you know, killed this person. And from what you're saying, maybe they do feel better, right?

I think they do temporarily, and then they're in prison for the rest of their days.

There's that. Yeah.

But they're fighting this very real urge. I mean, we've evolved as humans over such a long time to need to tell one another these things. So I can't remember now in the book which— there's one very infamous murderer I think Edmund Kemper it was who spoke about this. He spoke about having to keep secrets from the police and how that was actually eating him alive despite being a psychopath, which was really, really interesting to learn about. So I think there's definitely, for everybody, there's some sense of relief in revealing this thing to the world. You don't have the secret eating you up on the inside anymore, but then you of course have to deal with the reality of it. I think on a really micro level, we all experience this when maybe we did something embarrassing or bad or whatever, and you want to tell a friend. Part of the reason you want to tell the friend is because you want your friend to sort of laugh with you and say, hey, what you did wasn't so bad, come on. And you have a bit of a laugh. And then that friend goes home or something.

You know, you were out for a drink and they go home and you have that feeling of like, oh God, why did I— oh man, why did I tell that guy? Because he's going to tell— now my secret's out there. People are going to learn about it. But in that moment, you were almost compelled to. You had to tell him that secret. And so many of us, no matter how many times we learn that lesson, we still make that same mistake because it feels better to get that secret out.

Well, you know that old saying, I think it was Benjamin Franklin, you know, said, 3 people can keep a secret if 2 of them are dead. That, as in your example, you tell this person the secret. Why does that person feel so compelled to say, well, you know, I was talking to Bob and Bob told me this.

And why do we feel compelled to tell other people's That's a great question, and it's something that ultimately my advice to anybody would be, if you don't want people to find out about your secrets, don't tell anybody. And the studies show that the closeness or the proximity of you to the person, no matter, you know, let's say it's your best friend, it's your wife, whatever it is, somehow it doesn't have any bearing on how likely they are to reveal it to other people. They still do. That's what's extraordinary. I couldn't believe that because I would have thought, hey, it's my best friend. I got to be super careful about this secret. That's how I feel. I think we all feel that way about secrets. And yet we still tell them. And I would— I can't stress that enough. If you've got a secret you don't want anyone knowing, do not tell your best friend. Don't tell your wife, your mom. Just— you're just going to have to suck it up. It's going to hurt, but tell no one.

So that whole idea of, you know, hey, hey, can you keep a secret? Or Don't tell anyone I told you this, but that just really just doesn't work.

We all know, you know, that feeling, don't you? Because you ask, you ask the person, can you keep a secret? And they say, inevitably, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they're desperate. They're desperate to get your secret. And you then feel desperate to give it away for all the reasons I've mentioned, intimacy and the fever model and all of these things. You're desperate to give this person a secret and to trust them. And the minute they've gone home, you go, oh, why did I do that? Because you know there's a good chance that that close friend of yours is going to reveal that to someone else. And once it's out there, you've lost control of the narrative. There's probably been some sort of change in your secret as well. You've just totally lost control of something, the, the one thing that you more than anything wanted to keep dear to you, which was your secret.

I was just speaking with a friend not long ago, and she was telling me how People seem to tell her their secrets. For some reason, there's something about her that encourages people to unload whatever their secrets are. And I, I wonder, like, who are those people? What is it in those people that makes other people feel comfortable in revealing their secrets?

We somehow have an inbuilt radar that knows not to tell polite, enthusiastic people our secrets. And we do in fact tell assertive, compassionate people. And those are the people who in our movies tend to be the heroes. And think of Schindler's List, Oskar Schindler. He wasn't polite by any means. He was a serial— I think he was a liar or a philanderer, at least at the beginning of that film, I seem to recall. But there's something about him that we like and trust because we know that he's not polite. So he's not going to stick to the rules. of the Nazis. He is also assertive. He gets things done. He can actually help you if you tell him about your secret.

I also wonder too if people tell people their secrets in hopes that that person's gonna say, oh, that's not so bad. Oh, you're okay.

Yeah.

I think you want some sort of, you know, stamp of approval that I'm not as horrible as I think I am. You know, I just have this sense that people are more worried, maybe paranoid, about their secrets getting out. And maybe it's because of social media, or I don't know, like, if your secret gets out, it gets out in a big way kind of thing. And it just seems people are— and maybe that's why people are more guarded about what they say and who they say it to, because the exposure of your secret could be huge.

And I would wager that the average person has to keep more secrets now than they used to. I, I did a poll of my podcast listeners for the book, and, uh, I did a lot— it was a lot of it was about sexual habits and gross habits like nose picking, you know, because people feel so ashamed if they're caught picking their nose. But my study found that something like 99% of people feel they do it excessively, and that's an example of shame when actually it's what everybody else does. Uh, not that I am advocating for a society in which we publicly start picking our noses. I don't, I don't think that's an improvement on our current society. But just to say that, um, when I ask people, do you have to hide your political opinion on social media? Uh, and I asked a few questions like that. Do you ever, uh, lie about your politics, um, on social media? Um, and a very high percentage of people did do that. Um, they feel like they, they can't speak freely. So I do feel we live in quite an oppressive reality right now. And I think we probably do keep quite a lot of secrets as a result of that.

Well, it's interesting using your example of nose picking, that people are like keeping that secret that they do that. And they're keeping that secret from people who do the same thing and are also keeping it secret from everybody else, but they do the same thing.

That's right. I mean, one of the stories I tell is a friend of mine, told me, uh, he, he was— he remembers one of his earliest memories. He was like 12 or 13, or I don't know, and, uh, his mum was driving him to school in, in a car, and he had his finger right up his nose. And he looked out because they were in traffic, and he looked out and there were 3 girls like a year older than him who were all looking at him and giggling and laughing. And they'd been seemingly walking along the car for quite some time while he had his finger up his nose. And even you know, 20 years on, that has stayed with him because of the stigma, because it is just the worst thing you can be seen doing in public. And yet it is something that those girls, according to my study, would likely have done in their own home. And how sad that he was made to feel that way. But I don't have an answer there because I also— I quite like that we have enough stigma in society to stop us from doing that and walking around just spitting and nose picking And, uh, doing all sorts of horrible habits.

Yeah, right. Yeah, I'm with you on that. Yeah. Well, this is something that everybody thinks about. Everybody has their secrets. Everybody's probably holding on to a secret from somebody else and struggles with telling other people. People think about this, so it's really interesting to get your insight into it. I've been speaking with Andrew Gold. He is an investigative journalist and filmmaker. And he is author of the book, The Psychology of Secrets. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Andrew. It was great having you here.

Oh, thank you so much.

It's probably true for all languages, but there are a lot of weird things about English that you've probably wondered about. Like, why do the lowercase letters I and J have dots on top of them, but the uppercase versions of those letters don't? Why do we even have upper and lowercase letters in the first place? Why are the letters in the order they're in— A, B, C, D, etc.? Why are the numbers 11 and 12 not one-teen and two-teen? The answers to all these and other questions are really fascinating, and you are about to hear those answers from my guest, Paul Anthony Jones. He is a linguist and author of the book, Why Is This a Question? Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask. Hi, Paul. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hi, Mike. How are you?

Good. How are you?

I'm really good. I'm really good. Thanks for having me on.

Of course. Of course. So look, I, I'm, I'm somebody who likes the English language. I like words. I like talking about how the language works, but I'm not in your league. I mean, you're, you're in a whole Different league.

I think I've been obsessed with words and language my entire life. I always tell the story that when I was, I think I was about 7, and my grandparents bought me a dictionary for Christmas, and I sat and read it like you would read, you know, a Dickens novel or something. I read it cover to cover. I was just obsessed with it. I don't know why. I've tried to figure out why over the years. I think there was maybe a sort of order out of chaos aspect to it, that everything was suddenly there in this book. Everything you could ever possibly need to know was there.

So I want to jump right into some of the things that you've discovered and looked at. And first of all, why is it that English has uppercase and lowercase letters?

Yeah, this is an interesting one. That was actually when I was first putting this book together, that was one of the very first questions that I thought, yeah, I'll answer that. The odd thing about this actually is that it doesn't have all that much to do with English. It's more to do with the history of pretty much all the languages in Europe. If you go back far far enough, there wasn't such a thing as upper and lowercase letters across here in Europe, where most of the languages from which English is descended belong to what's called the Proto-Indo-European or the Indo-European family tree of languages. And it's in here that you'll find these upper and lowercase letters. Originally, they were all uppercase. And then as, I guess, Greek got handed over to Latin and Latin took over and went everywhere and languages kind of developed and one give way to the next. The pressures on that system kind of led to lots and lots of new things coming in. Spaces being put between words for the first time ever, punctuation coming out of nowhere, and suddenly we had commas and full stops and breaths and things.

And upper and lowercase letters was just another aspect of that. Lots of reasons why they came about. Partly it was to do with saving space on paper if you had smaller variations of things. Partly it was to do with disambiguation. Some letters look like other ones, so if you have different variants of them, then it works to have, to have upper and lowercase. It also helps to differentiate between titles and names and formal applications like that. So lots and lots of reasons why it came about.

When we have some— we have 2 letters that I can think of that when we use it in— when we use the lowercase version, I and J, there's a a dot on the top.

Yeah.

What's that about?

Yeah, this is a good question. Yeah, again, this comes back to— it's a really, really old aspect. Um, that kind of old— we sometimes call it Gothic, we sometimes see it written as Old English lettering. It's that really formal quill-based text. Uh, it's properly known as blackletter, um, that emerged in Europe in, again, in the kind of medieval era. Uh, the letters in, in that kind of style of writing are made up of individual flicked shapes called minims. They're those kind of little lines that look almost like a little number 1, very long and thin with these little flicks, serifs, at either end. The problem with building letters out of those kinds of shapes is that 2 or 3 of them together can get a little bit confusing. If you write 2 of them one side by side, it might be the 2 strokes of a lowercase n, or it might be the 2 strokes of a lowercase u, or it could be 2 letter i's. And if there are 3 in a row, it could be an m. If there are 3 in a row, stroke could be a W when W crept into the language as well.

So there's this huge problem in terms of legibility with this style of writing, which was popular for centuries, but it had this one kind of flaw in it that a lot of the letters could almost sort of bleed into one another. And so very ingeniously, this technique emerged for this. If one of these strokes, if one of these minims, is just an individual letter like it is in a single letter I, then a dot. It's called a tittle, that mark. The dot above the I was added to say, this is an individual letter. You take this letter just on its own. And so lowercase i got this dot. J later became just a kind of evolved out of i. J was originally just a variant of i. You sometimes see that even in dictionaries through to the 1800s, early 1900s. You'll sometimes still see i and j counted as a single entry in a dictionary because they were once one and the same. So because I had a dot, J had a dot, and we've kept it going ever since.

Why in English do we capitalize the word I? When, when referring to myself, I say I. When I write that, it's a capital I. Not, not in a lot of other languages. So why do we capitalize I?

There is a lovely theory that it's something to do with the sort of inherent egotism of English speakers, that when we're talking about ourselves, then we make sure that we're capitalized because not many other languages do it. Certainly French doesn't. Spanish doesn't, just about any language that's comparable with English, it doesn't do it. But again, it comes down to less to do with the speakers and more to do with this idea of legibility, a single stroke. It just happens to have been the case that our first-person pronoun has ended up being a single stroke, just one of these minims. And so we think there are other theories, but we think that we started capitalizing the letter I, making the letter I, or the pronoun I, I should say, slightly bigger than all other letters, just so that it stood out more in this kind of mishmash of text on formal documents and in scripture and things like that. And again, we don't necessarily need to do it anymore, our printing techniques have improved, but we've still maintained it, we still do it today, and we're one of the very few languages— I certainly can't think of any others off the top of my head—

but we must be one of the very few languages that still does this, Well, in comparing English to other languages, as you just did, one of the interesting things about English versus, say, French is French genders everything, and, and we don't. We— everything is either masculine or feminine in French, but only things that are masculine and feminine are masculine and feminine in English.

This is an interesting one. That what you're talking about there in terms of English today, like we have word pairs like like what actor and actress and waiter and waitress and things like that is what's called in grammatical terms, it's called natural gender, where we bend the language to match the actual person that we're talking about. But like you say, French has a grammatical gender. A bridge is masculine or feminine, a cat is masculine or feminine, a table is masculine or feminine. In lots and lots and lots of different languages, English oddly used to do that. We did used to have gender in our language. If you go back to Old English, we had gendered nouns, and it's just one of these things that as English has evolved and it's simplified over the centuries, thanks largely to lots of outside influences kind of forcing it and battering it into new shape, it's one of the complexities that we've jettisoned over the years, so we don't do it anymore.

So we have our 26 letters that make up our words, that make up our language, But other languages have, you know, Asian languages have their characters and Middle Eastern languages have characters that don't resemble our letters. So why do we have letters and where did they come from and what's the history there?

That's a really good question. Yeah, it's one of the very kind of first things that gave me the idea for the book was I put on Twitter years and years ago about how our letter A comes from, if you trace it back far enough, from a hieroglyph of an ox's head. Because our alphabet, the Latin alphabet, before then it was being used by the Etruscans. The Etruscans took theirs from the Greeks. The Greeks took theirs from the Phoenicians. And the Phoenicians, goodness knows how many thousands of years ago, we think used a writing system that was partly based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. And they had for one of their letters an ox's head. And the problem with an ox's head and the problem with a hieroglyph is that it's quite complicated to draw a picture of an ox's head every single time you want to represent a single sound. And so as that alphabet was passed on and passed on, the symbols that we used really simplified. So that ox's head turned around and twisted around so that it was slightly easier to draw. And it's from there that we get our letter A, as you say.

When you write a capital letter A, that point at the top is the nose, the lines at the bottom, those are the ears or the horns, and the line that goes across that was the, the back of the head almost. That was where the, the horns and the ears came out of. And you can do this with a lot of our letters if you trace them back through historical documents. You can see that, uh, our letter N looks the way that it does because that was originally a snake. Our letter M is that sort of zigzaggy shape because it was, um, descended from a hieroglyph of water, so it looks a little bit like waves. And so there are, there are quite a few of our letters that you can do this with, that you can trace it back far enough to say, oh, it was originally this. And you can pin it down to these original hieroglyphs of, what, 4,000 years ago?

So we have our alphabet in the order that it's in— A, B, C, D, etc. Why is it in that order? Is it just, it has to be in some order, so that's the order it's in? Or is there more rhyme and reason to it?

Yeah, this is another one of these questions that I didn't know the answer to. And the interesting thing about this is that I was looking for a sort of of a silver bullet. I was looking for that one thing that went, the reason it's in this order is this. And actually, when you start to look into this, you don't have that one answer. You've probably got 26 different answers. Every single letter has sort of been hammered into place over years and years and years. So there isn't a single story. There are lots of individual stories. It goes back to that idea of I and J, they are basically the same letter. So J simply kind of slotted into place next to the letter it descended from. A similar thing happened with U, V, and W. all of which were originally the same letter. The interesting thing is, though, that if you trace the alphabet back, as I say, as far as we can to Phoenicia, which was very eastern Mediterranean, you'll find right slap bang in the middle of the Phoenician alphabet, you'll see a letter that looks a little bit like a K, and it's next to a letter that looks a bit like an L, which is next to one that looks a bit like an M and an N, and then there's a P.

And so there's this kind of bare-bones idea, there's this skeleton of of the alphabet that you can see that's sort of always been in the order that it's been. And others have chopped and changed, and others have jumped around, but in these ancient texts you can still see the alphabet where it is. And what we think, based on some of the architectural— archaeological, rather— finds that we've made over the years, is that the alphabet would probably originally have been somewhat randomized, and then once it was being actively taught, it was maybe put into some kind of order that made it easier to remember. So there might have been a story or a rhyme or a poem or something like that that matched an easy way of remembering all of the letters that the Phoenician alphabet had. Until we find that, until we find a copy of that text, if we ever do— I don't know how likely it is that we will— that's really just the best theory that we have. We certainly can't prove Do we know why?

I've heard comedians talk about this, like why in our number system we have 11 instead of oneteen, 12 instead of twoteen, 15 instead of fiveteen. Why?

Yeah, it's interesting that all of our numbers slot into these sort of nice, neat sets of 10 apart from 11 and 12. The teen ending there is just a form of the number 10. So like you say, 15 should be fiveteen. It kind of originally was almost. in Old English, and it's just morphed over time into this slightly truncated version. But 11 and 12 are these real outliers. They just don't match in that way. The reason why 11 and 12 were set apart though is because they're so useful arithmetically. There is a lot more that you can do with multiples of 12 than you can with multiples of 10. If you've got 10 of something, all you can do is really half it or split it into groups of 2. 12, you can split into 2, 3, 4, 6. And the same goes with 24 rather than 20, 144 rather than 100. So we think that these 2 numbers earned separate names because they were so useful. And we see this in measurements and in timings and things. 60 minutes in an hour is a multiple of 12. So we think that you can just do more with it, and that's why it earned itself a different name.

So talk about how words get put together in a sentence. And what I mean by that is, for example, and I don't know Spanish well, but when you want to ask for something in Spanish, the please, the por favor comes at the end, whereas in English it's please give me the juice. And in Spanish it's give me the juice, por favor.

Yeah.

What—

so why do the words go in the order they go in?

This is a really interesting one. Yeah. In English, we have what's called an SVO, or a subject-verb-object order. So we have a tendency to build sentences by saying, this thing did this to that thing. I ate a pizza. You drank a coffee. That tends to be how we arrange sentences. The odd thing is we have a kind of tendency to think what we do in English is the normal thing, that everyone must do that. But there are 6 different permutations of an S, a V, and an O. And you'll find all of those different combinations in other languages. And actually, what we do in English isn't the commonest. Most languages are what's called subject-object-verb. So the verb goes at the end. And weirdly, we think that that's actually the way that all languages originally operated. So what we do in English is actually not what we're meant to do. And this has been proved by not just studies of other languages, but there have been experiments done that show how your brain actually interprets language and how it tries to form sentences. There's a great experiment that was done where people were told to communicate simple sentences to one another without speaking.

And absolutely everybody, no matter what their mother tongue language was— there were Arabic speakers, there were Spanish speakers, English speakers, all sorts of people in this experiment— everybody ended up using subject-object-verb. So you'd have people pointing at someone and pointing at window and then miming the action of closing the window. So they put the verb at the end. This seems to be how we're kind of hardwired to arrange the words in our sentence. The reason why we don't do that— well, there's a few different reasons. One of them we think that comes into play is the fact that the subject and the object have to be nouns. They're things, and the verb is intangible. You can't imagine, you know, the process of eating eating without imagining someone putting food in their mouth. The problem with that though is that those solid things could get muddled up. So, you know, if I say, I eat a pizza, the pizza isn't going to eat me. There's no chance of getting those muddled up. But in a sentence like, the dog chased the cat, something like that, it's completely feasible that a cat could chase a dog. And if the structure of the language is to put all of the nouns together and then the verb at the end, in a fast-paced conversation there is a chance that people might misunderstand.

They might think the cat chased the dog rather than the dog chased the cat. And so one of the theories we have is that we ended up putting the verb in between the nouns, in between the subject and the object, to avoid that kind of potential, anyway, that potential confusion. But like I say, what we do in English is by no means the normal thing around the world. It's certainly not the normal thing that happens in our brains. And like you say, we're not unique. There are lots and lots of different ways that other languages operate.

Here's something I think people wonder about is we have words in English that have 2 letters, same letters together, like the word tell, but it doesn't need 2 L's. It would be fine with just one. And we have several words like that. Why do we— why is— why the double L?

It seems almost sort of unnecessary.

Right, right, right.

Sometimes it's to do with what's called the 3-letter rule. So a word like— oh, let's have a think— a word like ebb. If the tide ebbs, there's no need for that to have 2 2-letter Bs. But we have this strange quirk in English that we like nouns to have at least 3 letters, so we tend to double them if you have something like that. That's this odd quirk. It's not a hard and fast rule, but it's more just something that seems to have snuck in through the back door, I think, a little bit. We have double vowels a lot of the reason to represent long vowels historically. This was something that came out in a period called the Middle English period, which is the medieval period of English, really. So a word like goose with a long open O sound, and it needed to be differentiated because there might be other words that have a short O sound. So that's one of the reasons. A word like tell, yeah, it's an interesting one. Originally in Old English, we had something called gemination. So those double letters, those double consonants in some words were pronounced individually.

They were almost pronounced as separate letters. The difference, it's a difficult one for English to pick up on, but a good example of it is if you think of the word redder, as in more red than something else, and a red door. That little kind of stuttery double D that you get in red door, that is gemination. And in Old English, a lot of our double letters were pronounced like that. There was that sort of little hold between those 2 letters. Both of them were made clear. And so a lot of those have still survived into English We no longer have gemination. Other languages, Italian for instance, still does. English has thrown it out. It was too complicated. We got rid of it a long time ago.

Well, over the course of the last 20 minutes, you have explained things about the English language I never knew, and I find it all really fascinating. I've been speaking with Paul Anthony Jones. He is a linguist and has a very popular YouTube channel, and the name of his book is The title of the book is Why Is This a Question? Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask. And there is a link to his book in the show notes. Good talking to you, Paul. Thanks.

Oh, brilliant. Thanks so much, Mike. That was great.

You've probably heard people discuss or debate whether humans are naturally monogamous. And while that debate goes on, there are other species where it is absolutely true. For instance, gibbons. They're a small, slender, tree-dwelling ape, and the males and females are about the same size. They spend a lot of time hanging out together and grooming each other. Swans. Swans are monogamous, and their bonds last for many years, sometimes for life. Wolves. Packs of wolves often consist of a male, a female, and their offspring, and they stick together much like a human family. Albatrosses. They travel great distances over the ocean but always return to the same place and the same partner. Turtle doves. There's a reason they come in twos, and they tend to stay that way. Bald eagles typically mate for life and will only consider someone new in the event of their partner's death. And beavers. Beavers are not only faithful, they often parent and raise their offspring together. Although good beavers don't stray, bad beavers have been observed cheating. And that is something you should know. The absolute best way to show your support for this podcast is to help us grow our audience.

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