← Something You Should Know
Something You Should Know
The Proven Magic of Being Outdoors & The Curious History of A, B, C
00:49:26
The surprising benefits of being outdoors, the strange history of our alphabet, and what women find attractive.
Loading summary
Transcript77 lines
- [00:03]
A
Today on something you should know. Many ballpoint pens are designed to save your life if necessary. Then there are extraordinary health benefits to spending time outdoors. And it doesn't take much 17 minutes
- [00:19]
B
a day to give your body biological inputs that it's currently missing. Because we're indoors so much and because so much of the time that we do spend outside is incidental also.
- [00:32]
A
So what do women find attractive in a man? Not what a lot of men think. And the fascinating story of our English Alphabet. And the story keeps changing.
- [00:43]
C
The way that the letters look has changed the way that they're written on the page. The direction of writing. The only thing that has remained constant is the overall principle that it should be one symbol for one sound. Everything else is in flux.
- [00:58]
A
All this today on something you should know. One thing I love about summer is how simple getting dressed becomes. And I've noticed something kind of funny. When I'm getting ready in the morning, I keep looking for the same shirt. Not because I plan to wear it. It's just the one I want for me. That's my Quince linen shirt. It's light, it's breathable. It looks good without trying too hard. And somehow it works whether I'm meeting someone for lunch or just running errands. That's when you know you've bought something good. When you stop thinking about it and you just reach for it. I have several quince pieces now and they're all like that. Their T shirts are incredibly soft. The linen is perfect for the summer heat. And when the evening cools off, their lightweight cotton sweaters are exactly right. And they look great. What also impressed me is that Quint sells everything for 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly. Directly with ethical factories and skip the middleman. So you're paying for the quality. Not the middleman, not somebody else's marketing budget. And it isn't just clothing anymore. We've picked up things for the house and for travel too. And the quality is consistently excellent. Make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quince.comsysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U-I-N-C-E.comSYSK for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comSYSK something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers. When you look at a ballpoint pen, what do you think would be the deadliest part of that pen. It's not the ink. It's not the ballpoint. It's something else entirely. And I'm going to tell you as we begin this episode of something you should know. Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers. So take a look at the cap of almost any disposable ballpoint pen and you will see a tiny hole in the top. Now, most people assume it's there to keep the ink from drying out or to equalize the air pressure. And it does help with that. But that's not why it was added. The real reason is much more dramatic. The hole was first introduced by the Bic Pen Company in 1991. That little hole is designed to keep a person alive. If someone accidentally inhales a pen cap and it gets lodged in the airway, the that hole can allow enough air to pass to delay suffocation and buy precious time for emergency treatment. In fact, international safety standards now require many pen caps to be designed this way. So that tiny hole you've probably never noticed is actually one of the simplest life saving inventions you'll ever use. And that is something you should know. Your mother was right about a lot of things, including, including the fact that you need to get outside more. This isn't just a piece of common sense advice. Scientists are increasingly discovering that spending time outdoors isn't merely beneficial. It may be essential for your health. And that's becoming a problem because we now spend about 93% of our lives indoors. Think about it. We wake up inside, we work inside, we drive, we exercise inside, and then we come home and stare at screens under artificial light inside. In the process, we're cutting ourselves off from many of the natural signals that help regulate our sleep, energy, attention, metabolism, and even how we age. My guest believes we're living through what he calls an indoor epidemic. Dr. John Lipuma is a board certified physician and best selling author whose latest book is called Indoor Epidemic. And he joins me to explain why spending so much time indoors is may be affecting your health more than you realize and what you can do about it. Hi John, welcome to something you should know.
- [05:25]
B
Mike, so great to be back with you.
- [05:27]
A
So I've always believed, because my mother told me that outside is good, that the fresh air, sunshine, the birds singing, all of that is good for you. But clearly it's more than that. So what is it you want people to understand?
- [05:43]
B
What I'd like to get people to understand is that we spend 93% of our time of our lives inside and that nobody chose that number. But it's behind the four things that people feel every burnout, belly fat, bad sleep, and brain fog. And it's a new idea about the root cause of those problems that kind of ties them all together.
- [06:10]
A
And when we, you say we spend 90 plus percent of our time indoors, that's different than the past. Like how? Like 50 years ago, 100 years ago. Do you know what those numbers were then?
- [06:22]
B
Yes, 100 years ago it was about 50, 50. And that breaks down to 86% in buildings and 7% in vehicles on average. But that indoor confinement is something that your biology reads as confinement. And it's depriving us of essential biological inputs that our brains, our bodies, our microbiomes, all of us need to function optimally. I think it's in part responsible for the four B's I've just mentioned.
- [06:57]
A
And so what's the goal? What's the sweet spot? We're not going to get it down to zero. But what are you hoping? Where do you think the sweet spot is? Or what does the science say?
- [07:09]
B
I don't think there is any need to get it down to zero, but I do think that there's a minimum effective dose for being outdoors in an intentional way that optimizes your biology and helps to get rid of some of the problems that we're experiencing. And that minimum effective dose turns out to be from the science. 17 minutes a day. 17 minutes in a green or blue space of intentional time outdoors helps to. That's where mood and focus and blood pressure and blood sugar start to move. This isn't magic, it's just a minimum effective dose, like a minimum effective dose of a pharmaceutical.
- [07:53]
A
17 cumulative minutes over the day, or 17 consecutive minutes at one time.
- [08:00]
B
17 cumulative minutes over the day. I'm glad you asked that, because some people say I don't have 17 minutes in a row, which is fine. You actually don't need it. You need 17 minutes cumulative over the day to give your body biological inputs that it's currently missing. Because we're indoors so much, and because so much of the time that we do spend outside is incidental, we happen to go from car to coffee shop, from parking lot to home, and that time is not, shall we say, biologically rich or helpful to our bodies, except that we're moving outside, which is good. But too often we have our phone in our hand. And when your phone is in your hand, not only can you not watch where you're going, but your brain thinks you're still working. And One of the great purposes and saving graces of being outdoors is that it's kind of a neurological reset, which you need because so much of our lives are digitally saturated, surrounded by pixels.
- [09:14]
A
And so we know this because why? Because it sounds logical. It seems to make perfect sense. Everybody has a sense that they're probably spending too much time indoors. But peek behind the curtain here. Says who? Who says this is important?
- [09:32]
B
Well, actually that the 2200 studies I read for the book in the peer reviewed medical literature and agricultural literature and scientific literatures seem to add up to just this. For example, one of the most powerful inputs of light to the human body has been shown in a study where people were hospitalized in 1984 in Pennsylvania, studied by a guy named Roger Ulrich, who found people on either side of that hospital hallway and the hospitalized surgical patients on that hallway with a tree View, used 22% less opiates, went home from the hospital 0.8 days sooner, and the nurses thought they had a better hospital stay than the people. Same people, same operation. Not same people, but same operation, different side of the hallway. Those people had a view of a concrete wall. This actually changed hospital architecture in 1982 in Japan, endocrinologist named Ke Ling took men at that time were hypertensive and executives into a forest for forest bathing, which really should be called no endocrine optimization. It's a way of, of being around trees and using their microbial benefits and measured their blood pressure after two hours, which dropped 5 millimeters, which is the equivalent of a 14% reduction in risk for stroke and a 9% risk for heart attack. But more importantly, they had an immune boost of 56% of their natural killer cells, which are white blood cells that are the Navy SEALs of white blood cells and go out and kill tumor cells and virus cells in your body. That effect lasted a month. This isn't a cancer cure, but it's a real immune nudge that stacks on top of moving outdoors. There are literally thousands of studies on gardening, on forest bathing, on green exercise, deliberate movement outdoors, and of course, outdoor light is 25 to 50 times brighter than indoor light. And that has a direct effect on your vision.
- [11:57]
A
So talk about. Because I could. I could spend 17 minutes walking outside down Fifth Avenue in New York, or I could spend 17 minutes walking through the redwood forest in California. I imagine you're going to tell me that the redwood walk is better. But is it?
- [12:16]
B
And why it is better, but the fifth Avenue walk is not meaningless. It's just not as good for your health and here's the reason why. In that redwood forest, you get what King Lee described as phytoncides, which are active aromatic chemicals that trees make to communicate with one another and have this direct effect on our own immune system, actually working in the brain, crossing the brain barrier and improving our immunity, lowering our blood pressure and allowing our senses to kick in, which is how we experience nature.
- [12:55]
A
So how do the numbers work in this sense? I could be out all weekend, outside most of the weekend. So am I good to stay inside the rest of the week? Or is it a day to day thing or month to month thing? Or, like, how do you add up the numbers?
- [13:15]
B
I love these questions, Mike, because they're the questions that other people ask me too. And just like the 17 minutes total, a minimum effective dose, and by the way, the optimum dose is 43 minutes a day of intentional time in a green or blue space. It's like drinking one a night is really different than seven on Friday night. This is a cumulative phenomenon. It works cumulatively. You need to get 17 minutes daily. If you skip a day, not the end of the world. Skip two days, you're kind of offset. Skip three days and your circadian rhythm is gone. That's rounding the corners a bit about the science, but it's the big thrust of the correct point. And their circadian rhythm is where this biology really lives. As you know, the circadian rhythm that we all have is our body clock, how our body runs. Our bodies have a clock, and each organ actually has a clock as well. And it is only set with sunlight. And it's only set with sunlight that is bright, which is almost all sunlight. And it's most effectively set in the first hour of waking, because that's when your retinal receptors are most receptive to bright sunlight. So the first prescription, if you will, is to get out, do some of those 17 minutes in the morning, a minimum of 10 without sunglasses, not through a window, and look at the sky, because your eyes need distance like your lungs need oxygen, and they need to. You're A, giving them a, reset and B, focusing on something other than the notifications and direct messages on your phone. And C, you're allowing that strong photic input, strong bright light input to meet the back of your retina, which is what sets your body clock for the day. And then all kinds of good things happen if you get that minimum 10 minutes, preferably in the first 60 minutes, of being awake without sunglasses and not through a window.
- [15:34]
A
And I'm curious if it matters when you go outside, if it matters what you're doing while you're outside. And we'll explore that in just a moment. So Wayfair just became a sponsor here. So my wife and I, we've been spending way too much time on their website trying to decide what to get. Honestly, I had no idea they carried this much stuff. Furniture, outdoor living, lighting, everything for the kitchen, storage, rugs. I mean, it just keeps going. At first we were sure we were going to get a couple of Adirondack chairs for the backyard. But then we started looking at patio furniture because ours has seen better days. And somehow we ended up looking at lamps and storage cabinets. One thing that really surprised me was the prices. I kept finding things that looked like they'd cost a lot more. And I like that Wayfair has Wayfair verified where their product specialists actually test and vet products before recommending them. Plus, with over 20 million five star reviews, you can see what real customers think before you buy. I'll update you later on what we actually get. But if you've been putting off upgrading a room or your patio or really anything around the house, I highly recommend you just start browsing Wayfair. Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. That's W A Y-F-A-I R.com Wayfair Every
- [17:07]
C
style, every home
- [17:10]
A
One thing I've noticed after interviewing literally hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years is that almost nobody starts a business with a perfect plan. No, they start with an idea. That's how I started. But you gotta take the first step if you've got something you've always wanted to sell. Shopify makes that first step a whole lot easier. You don't have to worry about how your online store will look or how you're going to get paid or what your checkout process is. Shopify has all that handled. That means less time wrestling with the technology and more time doing what actually grows a business. Shopify already powers millions of businesses worldwide, from big brands like Mattel and Gymshark to new businesses just starting up. So maybe they should be powering your business as well. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com sysk that's shopify.com sysk shopify.com sysk we're talking about the benefits of being outside. And My guest is Dr. John LiPuma, author of the book Indoor Epidemic. So, John, you said that 17 minutes outside is what you need to do, but when you're outside, does it matter? Can you make it better depending on what you're doing? Or can you just sit in a chair and just be outside?
- [18:50]
B
You can sit in a chair, enjoy the outdoor light, sip your coffee, and then just. And do something else. Look at the sky, as I suggested. Watch the clouds change, see if the leaves move. If you incorporate activity, that is even better. So what I like to think of as a single going outdoors and getting bright light can be turned into a double if you're walking with someone. Because if you're walking with someone, you also get a boost of oxytocin. And you're moving in the morning. And movement in the morning is another what we call zeitgeber. A zeitgeber is what sets your body clock. And light is by far the most important. But movement is second. So you're doing two good things for yourself and your body clock at once. You're moving and you're getting bright light. And if you're doing it with someone, that's even better. If you're doing it with a dog or a companion animal, even better. And if you meet somebody while you're walking outdoors in the morning light with a dog, that's a home run.
- [20:03]
A
When people do this, and I'm sure you've worked with people who've done this, is there a noticeable difference or is it mostly internal things going on that are good for you? But you. There's no gigantic change in, wow, this is awesome. Or is there?
- [20:22]
B
No, there is actually. The people who have followed the protocols, I mean, a number of them anyway, have written to me or said to me, I can't believe how much better I'm sleeping. People's sleep improve dramatically. And the reason is within a few days and sometimes a week, as my experience. And the reason is that when you set your body clock in this way, you get more deep sleep, which is the phase of sleep, that's non REM sleep, during which you do all kinds of things that are good for yourself. First of all, you allow yourself, when you get morning light, to make melatonin that night so that you can have better quality sleep. Second, your brain engages in, or has the opportunity to engage in brain cleaning using what's called the glymphatic system. It was discovered in 2013 and the Nobel was given in 2017. It's a phase in deep sleep where the spinal fluid washes over the brain. Brain shrinks actually up to 40% and takes out toxins that have accumulated during the day. So you allow yourself to have efficient brain cleaning if you get morning light, because deep sleep only really occurs in the first half of sleep. And also you rebuild bone and you repair muscle during deep sleep. So you get this much more substantial phase of deep sleep if you get morning light. And it affects. And that sleep is restorative, just like REM sleep or the phase of sleep that you dream is restorative to your body. And that's why people feel so much, much better.
- [22:07]
A
Do you think from talking to people that the general idea here is a surprise? I mean, my mother told me when I was four to get outside and play, that there was a real push to go outside, that being outside is good for you. I can't imagine that's a surprise to anybody.
- [22:29]
B
Oh yeah. And the reason is that much younger generations are so used to having a screen centered existence. When I was young, I was told to go outside and play and not come back until dinner. And that seemed normal, but it no longer is. And it's resulted in real medical problems, not just the burnout and belly fat and bad sleep and brain fog I ticked off before, but in young people especially, it's resulted in myopia or nearsightedness. And half the planet actually will need glasses by 2050. As I've said, we need bright daylight, and outdoors is 25 to 50 times brighter than indoors. Even though indoor light, especially in TV studios and grocery stores, seems really light bright, it's actually not compared to the outdoors. Bright daylight releases dopamine in the eye, which tells the eyeball to stop growing longer. And when you're indoors with dim indoor light, even with screens, there isn't enough release of dopamine, so the eye keeps stretching and elongates. And that elongation and almost distortion of anatomy is very common.
- [23:46]
A
So for people who don't spend a lot of time outdoors, what do you suggest they do when they get there? Like, okay, so I'll go outside, but now what?
- [23:56]
B
I like to start with listening when I take people on tours, because often when you hear sounds within the first 30 seconds of listening, wherever you are, if it's not in a. In the middle of fifth Avenue, let's say, but in a green space in a park, you hear a number of sounds right away. And then if you listen for 30 seconds more, you almost always hear sounds you didn't hear the first time but were actually still there. And that's your parasympathetic nervous system Your breast and digest nervous system kicking in so that you can use your senses. And of course my favorite thing to do outside is move. You know, if you, if you sit 10 hours, your DNA reads that as eight years older than your birthday age. But 30 minutes of movement daily offset it. So there are a lot of people who sit 10 hours a day in front of a computer, on a couch, watching a tv that is making them biologically older. So what you want to do is move a minimum of 30 minutes a day. And that can be simple walking, because walking outdoors is the most effective exercise for lowering all cause mortality. When we move outside, we are doing more than simply exercising our muscles. We're getting a lot of other biological input from air quality, which is almost always better outside than inside, and from the microbes in that air, which help us from the distance that we see. Your eyes need distance to reset. And we are using soft fascination, which is how our brain interprets the leaf movement or the bird song. Soft fascination is allowing the brain to make sense of a natural shape, which is actually much easier for it to make sense of hard rectangles and pixels on a screen. And the timing matters. It's not just minutes outside, it's when you go and what you do when you're there really matters. And this just feeds directly into to sleep. You know, going to bed every night at the same time actually cuts mortality risk by 19%. This is a study of 60,000 people using wearable trackers over eight years. We don't think about sleep as a lever with going outside, but one bad night of sleep flips two hormones. Your ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone that climbs up, and your leptin, which your fullness hormone drops when you have bad sleep, you wake up hungrier and you stay hungrier all day and your cortisol level goes up and you begin to store visceral fat more. And visceral fat's an inflammation factory, and that's for men. It turns testosterone into estrogen. And it's one reason why one bad month of sleep makes the next pound harder to lose.
- [26:59]
A
Well, based on what you said, clearly this is important. And yet with younger generations not used to being outside. And then of course, Covid didn't help that at all. It's not only getting them outside, but getting them to enjoy being outside and engaged and having fun because of the benefits that they'll get. I've been speaking with Dr. John Lipuma. He is a board certified physician and author of the book Indoor Epidemic. And there's a link to that book in the show Notes. John, thanks for coming on.
- [27:30]
B
Thank you so much for speaking with me.
- [27:32]
A
Right now, get up to 15% off select storage solutions put heavy duty HDX totes to good use, protecting what's important to you. The solid impact resistant design prevents cracking and the clear base and sides make items easy to find even when the totes are stacked. Find Select Shelving and Tote storage up to 15% off at the Home Depot. To organize every room in your home from your garage to your attic, visit homedepot.com how doers get more done this episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling Smart move, Another smart move getting help from one of State Farm's 19,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. You use it every day. You learned it before you could read, and yet most of us know almost nothing about it. It's the Alphabet. Why does English have 26 letters? And why are they in that particular order? Why does the letter Q seem incapable of going anywhere without the letter U tagging along right behind it? The Alphabet may seem simple, but behind those 26 symbols is a story filled with ancient civilizations, accidents of history, power struggles, and some surprisingly odd rules that still shape the way you read and write today. Here to uncover this fascinating hidden history is linguist, writer, researcher, and broadcaster Danny Bate. He's author of a book called why Q needs you. Hey Danny, welcome to something you should know.
- [29:26]
C
Hello Mike. Thank you very much for having me.
- [29:28]
A
You know, we've had several guests on through the years talking about the English language, and we always talk about words and phrases and sentences, but we so seldom, if ever really talk about the Alphabet. I claim to not know much about it.
- [29:45]
C
Yes, absolutely. And firstly, nobody should ever berate themselves for not thinking about the Alphabet in certain ways. I think it's kind of a victim of its own success. It fits so unobtrusively into our modern lives that we don't really give it a second thought. And that's just fine. But I'm here to tell people where it comes from. And the short answer is Egypt, a very long time ago.
- [30:07]
A
And is it possible to, like, drill down into actual people or small groups of people?
- [30:14]
C
Not people that I can name for you. I mean, I can't give them a more A snappier title than, say, West Semitic dialect speakers in Egypt, which is pretty long winded, but it's as close as we can get to the Alphabet's innovators to unpack that term. What I have in mind is a population of people working and living and well integrated into ancient Egypt. But crucially, at least linguistically, they aren't Egyptians, they aren't native Egyptian speakers. They have their own language, a language that's kind of like a great, great uncle to today's Arabic and Hebrew. And they look at Egyptian hieroglyphs, which are already very old, and say, well, we want in on that. Your writing system is working really well for you, so we're going to take it as the basis for our own brand new system. And when they do that, our Alphabet is born.
- [31:03]
A
And so how did the English Alphabet emerge from Egypt where they weren't speaking English? Sure.
- [31:11]
C
I mean, there's a few thousand years in between the ultimate invention of the Alphabet and eventually meeting the English language, to be clear, the spoken English language, which is in England. So if we put the birth of the Alphabet in, let's say, 1900 BC, the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, as I mentioned, it goes on this long journey and via the Greeks and via the Romans, it eventually meets spoken English in England, specifically southern England, round about the year 600 AD. So, yeah, 2,000 years, really, between invention and meeting English and being put to good use in the writing down of English and English. And the alphabets have been partnered up ever since.
- [31:55]
A
I think everybody who uses the language, which is, you know, everybody listening to this, wonders why the language and the Alphabet is the way it is. Why, for example, the title of your book, is there always a U after Q? Why is A the first letter? Well, let's start with that. Why is A the first letter?
- [32:18]
C
So this is part of the joy of studying the history of the Alphabet. A is clearly one of the original gang of the Alphabet. Certain letters have come and gone, certain letters have been added or developed out of others over the history. But A is right there at the very beginning. It doesn't really look like A. It looks actually more like a cow's head, because it is a cow's head to begin with, a sort of pictographic version. It doesn't even stand for a vowel at this very early point in time. And even things like the alphabetical order, which we still sing in our English lessons to this day, is a little bit mysterious. Clearly there was a logic that is somewhat lost to us. My favourite theory is that it's a sort of mnemonic to begin with, a kind of aid memoir that would help young Bronze Age learners of the Alphabet to remember all the letters.
- [33:07]
A
But when you say A is one of the original gang and that letters have come and gone, what letters have come and gone?
- [33:15]
C
It all depends on what part of the family tree you take. So if you take, let's say, the English branch of the family tree, we can see slowly in English and the use of the Alphabet in Western Europe over the Middle Ages. We see things, for example, like J emerging, J slowly develops out of I. We also see U and V slowly separate themselves from each other. And that's a process that's really not complete until the modern era. Someone like Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster might have still thought of them as kind of one and the same letter, but almost two letters by that very late point in the day. Other ones that have been invented since the early days, like W, for example, that comes in slowly after the days of ancient Rome. And then English has lost them. So if people know a little bit of old English, that's 2,000 years ago. Very, very, very different. It's basically a foreign language. There are letters in Old English that we don't use today, like thorn, which is used to write down the th sound, Th and also the slightly different version. That's very useful, but it's just fallen by the wayside for various linguistic and social reasons.
- [34:29]
A
Well, can we bring it back? I mean, that's great. You know, the th sound in English is so common. It'd be great to have one symbol for that double letter sound. Can you, I mean, you're a linguist. Can you, can you bring it back?
- [34:44]
C
Well, the short answer is yes. I'm afraid that people who take great pride in the Alphabet and that's absolutely fine, but if they are working with the idea that the Alphabet's fixed, it's really not. It has never been fixed. You only need to go back as far as, say the year 1900 and to find a full written out version of the Alphabet. You'll find slightly changed version. For example, you might find ampersand, the little and symbol. You'll find that typically at the end, that's a quite common hallmark of the Alphabet in English usage in the 18th and 19th century. It's never been fixed from day one. The way that the letters look has changed, the way that they're written on the page, the direction of writing, what sound they stand for. The only thing that has remained constant is the overall principle, the overall ideal that it should be one symbol for one sound. That's the fundamental alphabetic principle and it's still arguably there. Everything else is in flux.
- [35:46]
A
So since it is the title of your book, I really, and I have always been curious why Q can never stand by itself. It always has to have a U after it. And because who says so?
- [35:58]
C
I would say. Who says so? I would pin this on the door of the Romans, basically. Q, just like A, is one of the original members of the gang, and it probably starts out life as a kind of a pictographic monkey. I think that's the strongest theory, that Q looks like a monkey and it stands for the consonant at the beginning of the inventor's word for monkey, like a kind of K sound. It's not quite K, but it's a bit different. So it fully deserves its place in the Alphabet to begin with. But as the Alphabet and as that letter passes through very different kinds of spoken languages with very different sounds, it becomes superfluous. It passes through the hands of the Greeks, where it stands for K, plain old K. The Greeks then drop it because they have kappa. They don't need this Q letter. It survives long enough to make it into Italy, where the Romans are based. And the Romans are really ruthless with the ancient Alphabet. They really prune dead letters that their spoken language, which is Latin, doesn't need. They get rid of K, for example, and they in favour of C, but they keep Q around because for their ears and in their brains, qu, as in a word like quis, who in Latin, or, I don't know, equites, meaning knights, because of that slightly different qu sound, they think of that as something different. And consequently. Consequently, it can keep its own spelling so long as it's partnered up with U. So it's. It's no, it's no, I'm not being dramatic. To say U. To spell that particular sound in combination with Q saved the life of Q. If it hadn't been for that and that Roman sort of system of sounds, Q would have gone the same way
- [37:44]
A
as K. Is it an absolute rule, in other words? You know, English is so full of exceptions. Are there any words where Q stands alone that defy that rule?
- [37:56]
C
Oh, absolutely, yes. They just tend to be more recent arrivals in the language arrivals or inventions. So I have a QWERTY keyboard before me right now. But also, people who either love Chinese culture or the game Scrabble may be particularly fond of the concept of qi, which, because of the Chinese Romanization of letters, is spelt qi. Also, lots of Words that come in from, say, Arabic, where we're trying to spell a particular Arabic consonant. We might use Q on its own for that, but these are more recent. The vast majority are spelt with a u because that's the Roman way. And English has just been so influenced by Rome.
- [38:35]
A
So English does have all these bizarre things in it. And my sense is it's just because it's been around a while and things get. But we have, like, silent letters. Why do we have silent letters? If they're silent, why do we need them?
- [38:49]
C
So the thing about silent letters, I'm a fairly reluctant defender of them because sometimes they can serve a purpose. I mean, I don't know if. If you take out the silent GH from night and fight, the pronunciation changes. You get knit and fit. So they can contribute things maybe without much appreciation. Some silent letters have just always been silent and they contribute nothing. They're there for various cultural reasons. So big fans of the Renaissance and the humanistic period, people who love Latin and Greek, they're responsible in, let's say, the 15th century, 15th, 16th century, for putting the be back into words like debt and doubt, because they come from Latin words that had be. They've never been pronounced in English, though. Other examples of silent letters are actually cases of letters that have fallen silent within the history of English. So we know, say, from poetry, alliterative poetry of the Middle Ages, that a word like kneel with a silent king was once knail. It was pronounced. It's just the standard spelling is set, and then the letters fall silent because speech drops them from pronunciation. Totally normal sound change. It just happened after English spelling starts to solidify and a standard starts to emerge. So I don't know words like I mentioned silent GH that was once always pronounced. And if you start pronouncing the GH in night and fight, it starts to sound like German or Dutch for good reason. And yes, silent K at the beginning of no, silent G at the beginning of nor silent W at the beginning of write and writing. They were all once pronounced, but they've fallen silent.
- [40:32]
A
We also have words in English where we have double consonants, where it seems as if one would be fine. You know, we have two Cs in raccoon, but if you took one C away, you'd still say raccoon. And it happens a lot. So why do we do that?
- [40:47]
C
Yeah, it is interesting. It's something that I think doesn't get that much love as a system of English. We like to double our consonant letters and yet not pronounce them as two. So I don't know. An Italian speaker has absolutely no problem pronouncing a double D or a double C as if it were a long consonant sound, as in a word like, I don't know. Cappuccino is slightly held for longer, but English doesn't do that. So we spell words, really common words like, I don't know, let, and better, and, I don't know, something like grammar with a double M. And we don't pronounce it grammar. It's just a single sound grammar. What's going on is that English has innovated this system where the double letter is not telling us about the sound, the consonant that it represents. It's actually telling us about the vowel that comes immediately before. So you can test this for yourself. If you take out one of the T's from better, you might instinctively pronounce it beta. It's the E. The first E is going from an E to an E vowel. And this is something that English has been doing for centuries. And it works. It really works. It allows us to spell the difference between a hatter, as in, you know, the mad hatter, and a hater. It's all a matter of the double T, despite the fact that the T remains the same in pronunciation. I've argued that this is actually still alive in English reading and writing today, because you have the platform Instagram, if I may mention, an app. And if you want to be Instagrammed and not Instagrammed, you need to double the final M. So this is very much a living process where we are computing a system that tells us about the sound of vowels. I just think that's genius and it really does deserve to be better known.
- [42:37]
A
Explain, if you can, why we, very commonly in English have a silent E at the end of words like cope, dope, where the E makes the o long, but it's two letters away. So it's like, how does it. How did. Seems like a weird thing.
- [42:56]
C
It is this. It's one of the quirks of English. It's something that other languages would find a bit odd in the abstract, but nonetheless, we manage it. And in the same way that we're using consonant letters to spell more sounds, we're also using, you know, magic E. It's often known as magic E, or the technical and duller term is split digraph, that, as you correctly say, the E is at a distance, it's separated by some other letter. And this is basically that English has more vowel sounds than the Alphabet can spell. So we've had to innovate somehow. Once upon a time, that final E, that magic E that's fallen silent would have been pronounced. It would have been pronounced at a distinctive sound if you go back over the centuries. But being at the end of the word, being very liable to kind of be muffled in pronunciation, unstressed in the words, it falls silent. And yet at the same time, in spelling, it can require or it can gain new employment, which is then, as you, as you quite rightly say, helping us to pronounce more vowels. Because, you know, we think of the vowels of English as A, E, I, O, U. But that's just the Alphabet. That's just the letters that we've been given by antiquity. English vowel sounds, so much more of them, so many. I mean, you know, there's the O and E and oi and au, all of these letters that don't have their own distinctive letter. So since the late medieval period, we've had to innovate. And one of the ways we've done this is to use that silent magic E. Hey, it works.
- [44:31]
A
The order of the Alphabet, Is it random? Is there a method of the madness to it, or it isn't really worth discussing? I mean, why is it A, B, C, D, E, F, G?
- [44:46]
C
Well, this brings me back to that really quite mysterious point in time where we're just working with fragments. And this is the kind of frustrating thing that you might think, well, it should be obvious we have all this evidence for the history of the Alphabet, but. But if you think about your own daily life, how often since school have you, in general, as native English writers and readers, written out the full Alphabet? It's something we do when we're learning, but it doesn't really tend to come later on in life and that will affect our sources. So it is a little bit mysterious working through a few fragments of basically Bronze Age homework and hoping they can tell us something about why the order is that particular way. As I mentioned, it's probably a mnemonic. It's probably a kind of way of remembering the letters, but it's not the only way. There is an alternative that we do have evidence for. And in some, most, you know, of the branches of the family tree, this ABC order becomes the norm. But if you go into related members, other branches in what is, what is East Africa, the Horn of Africa, languages like Amharic in Ethiopia, that use a distant relative of our own Alphabet, they actually use a different order, an equally ancient different order, and basically either could have done the job because it's not fixed. It wasn't a given.
- [46:08]
A
Yeah, well, when you think about it, I mean, the order is not all that relevant today. I mean, the order of letters today is probably more relevant on the QWERTY keyboard than it is on the Alphabet on top of the blackboard in the classroom.
- [46:23]
C
Well said. Absolutely well said. It's all about does it serve a purpose? And the layout of the keyboard, or the layout of the keyboard on your phone, for example, is perhaps the most relevant layout for us today. As I say, none of this is eternal. It's all bound up with the needs of whoever happens to be using the Alphabet.
- [46:42]
A
Is it in other languages as it is in English? And I don't know why it is in English that we have letters that have two very distinct sounds and in some cases both distinct sounds in the same word, like circus, where the C is hard and the C is an S sound. Is that unusual in language and why do we have it?
- [47:07]
C
If you set sounds as the foundations, they're going to get away from you. Because speech naturally changes in a way that really doesn't come naturally to writing. So let's take the Roman version of the Alphabet around the year 11 AD 1 BC. It works really well for Latin. They've been very ruthless. They've pruned the letters any dead weight that they don't need that they got from the Greeks. And yet then the sounds of everyday spoken Latin, especially in other regions of the Empire, are changing. They're shifting. So the difference between soft and hard C in a great word like circus is all to do with changes in speech. And that's not really reflected in spelling. The spelling with the two Cs is remained perhaps conservative and has remained the same. That's something that's happened in what you might call late or vulgar or popular everyday Latin. It's affected the pronunciation of French and Italian and Spanish, and the spelling has been taken on into English as well. Then we have English's own versions. So something like the A in a word like ant and the A in a word like able once upon a time would have sounded much closer to each other. But a distinctly English shift at the end of the medieval period called the Great Vowel Shift, and trust me, it really does deserve to be called the Great Vowel Shift, separates the pronunciation of the vowel in these two words. They go in two different directions. So it's long story short, sound change and sound changes basically stretch the Alphabet's capabilities.
- [48:39]
A
Well, what a great explanation of the Alphabet and how it got here. I just, you know, I've never learned this before. I find it really interesting. Danny Bate has been my guest. He is a linguist, a writer, researcher and broadcaster and he has a book out called why Q Needs you, and there's a link to his book in the show notes. Danny, great job. I appreciate your time.
- [49:01]
C
Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.
- [49:07]
A
What do women notice first about a man? If you think the answer is six pack abs, think again. Researchers who study attraction have found that while physical appearance certainly matters, it's often not the first thing women respond to. Eye contact, a genuine smile, posture, and the way a man carries himself can have a surprisingly powerful effect. In fact, one of the most consistent findings in attraction research is that confidence boosts attractiveness, not arrogance, not showing off confidence. Men who appear comfortable in their own skin, relaxed and self assured, they tend to be rated as more attractive than men who are physically similar but seem uncertain or insecure. As for physical features, studies suggest women often notice the face first, especially the eyes and smile, along with overall grooming and style. Height can play a role, but it's far from the whole story. So if you're looking to make a good first impression, forget obsessing about your biceps. The simplest way to appear more attractive may be to stand up straight, smile, make eye contact and act like you belong in the room. And that is something you should know. I always appreciate your willingness to help help us grow our audience, and the best way to do that is to tell someone you know. Share an episode with a friend and it's amazingly effective and we appreciate it. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.
- [50:43]
B
Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer? May I suggest your big wireless build?
- [50:49]
C
It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc, and a shocking twist where
- [50:53]
A
you realize you've been overpaying the entire time.
- [50:56]
C
Fortunately though, Mint's story is better.
- [50:58]
A
Every plan $15 a month, even unlimited.
- [51:00]
B
That's it.
- [51:01]
A
Happy ending, zero tears.
- [51:02]
C
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for
- [51:07]
A
six months or $80 for a 12 month plan. Required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than 50gb. Me slow when network is busy. C Terms
- [51:16]
C
Athletic Brewing Company crafts award winning non alcoholic beers for those who want to be part of every round. With over 185 flavor awards, they're exceptional NA beers that fit your lifestyle and any social occasion.
- [51:27]
A
Summer's full of good times, and Athletic fits right in.
- [51:31]
C
Go to athleticbrewing.com to have brews delivered to your door, or find them at a bar, restaurant or store near you. Near Beer Athletic Brewing Co. Fit for all times.