John McWhorter (4:09)

Trump and Besant are watching the bond market. You lose the bond market, you're going to lose everything.

Mike Pesca (4:14)

And that's why they actually reversed course yesterday in my mind. Oh, it's clear that I mean the bond market's, you know, ruling the day. We learned the lesson of how powerful the bond market actually is. Yes, those yips that quease, that is known as fear. And when the bond market for a time stopped acting as the reliable hedge against the vagaries of the stock market, that was all in the category called fear. Fear the market because the bond market gives quarter to none. On the show today, a great viral video by the Daily show about what Fox News covers when it doesn't want to cover the news. But first, we're back with John McWhorter on Filipinas with an F, Ms. Magazine with an S and the Rodney Dangerfield pronoun. New York Times columnist Glenn show regular and author of pronoun trouble John McWhorter, up next.

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Mike Pesca (5:49)

You know how much we hate the middleman. But sometimes the middleman looks really good. I mean, he looks sharp. If the middleman is wearing Quint's high quality travel essentials, you can't really begrudge him at least his sartorial style. I've been wearing quints for a while. I got some pants, I got a button down shirt. I got a sweater. I'm going to get the shorts and shirt for the change of season. Now why I mentioned the middleman, this good looking middleman, this middleman who's dressed to the nines. He's the guy who got cut out from the entire process to allow Quince to give its high quality items to you at an extremely low cost. And I have to say I'm glad the middleman is availing himself of Quince's offerings because he looks good and he's going to have to save some money and maybe go on a job interview. And there's dressy, there's less dressy, there's cash. Middlemen. All men, women too can benefit from the cut and quality of a Quince piece of clothing. For your next trip, treat yourself to the luxe upgrades you deserve from quince. Go to quints.com the gist for 365 day returns plus free shipping on all your orders. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com the gist to get free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com the gist we're joined once more by John McWhorter. He is the author of Pronoun Trouble, the Story of Us in seven Little Words. There's a lot to get to today, but if you remember yesterday, I was surmising and this is what I do with John. I talk and then I say a word. I'm like, oh yeah, about that word. Tell me everything you know about it. And he so frequently can do it. And what we were talking about yesterday was The Philippines, but Filipinas and Filipinos. How the Philippines are with a P but Filipinas and Filipinos are with an F. And I think. I don't know, I'll throw a theory out there. When we as English speakers think of the name of a country, we get to spell it how we want. But when the people in the country think of the name for themselves, they get more of a choice. But I don't know. In Tagalog, that's the language of the Philippines, right?

John McWhorter (8:07)

That's. That's the main language and that the main lingua franca. I imagine the idea would be to kind of pull the gaze away from it being named after some king in the peninsula of Asia called Europe, and to just have it be what we're called without thinking about Philip Ness. And I would understand that. But yeah, the X is, you know, this is an aesthetic judgment, but I think shared by most people, which is that X is kind of ugly. Whereas Latine, which some people have been trying, where at least you get a nice open vowel that somehow seems more plausible. But once again it's only going to be used by people mostly with advanced degrees trying to make a point. Because there are certain things you can't change about human cognition. Most people's cognition.

Mike Pesca (8:52)

I know W is the most recent letter. Is X fairly recent.

John McWhorter (8:56)

X is one of the latter. One of the latter letters because really we don't need it because we have K and S. So why do you have to have this thing? It's just a matter of random inheritance. It's not an accident that it's one of the last letters. It kind of comes the whole story of V, W, X, Y, Z. All of them are kind of weird and that's why they're at the end. And so yes, X is an odd one.

Mike Pesca (9:18)

I wonder if other languages. Basque has a lot of X in it or at least when we write Basque, if that is the language. Is the Basque language called Basque? Yes.

John McWhorter (9:28)

Yeah.

Mike Pesca (9:29)

Yes. I wonder if they use the X for things like X rated movies or X ray. We use X for things other than a letter in the middle of a word. I would say more often than we use X as a letter in a word.

John McWhorter (9:45)

Yeah, X has a kind of.

Mike Pesca (9:47)

So I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's so jarring that are just watching a basketball game with Xavier. You know, the Catholic roots to that name. But most laymen will call it. Lay people will call that Xavier because they're used to saying the X sort of as a meta letter. As opposed to the work the X is supposed to do because of things like X ray.

John McWhorter (10:08)

Yeah, that is very true. Whereas the truth is that in languages where X crept in meaning, often the sound has changed. And so it's really something like sh. If I see X in a foreign language, my first thought is it's probably sh. But yeah, many people think that it means that, for example, Basque is this language full of, you know, xylophone x ray. That there's weird xiness about it when really it's a very ordinary language in many ways, including its exy ness.

Mike Pesca (10:36)

So this is not the, if you will, the gist of the book. And we've talked about most of it and I. I want to pause and say, you are pro. If we give the impression that you only have critiques about the use of they as a non gendered plural. Quite the opposite. You're trying to assess and also find a way for it to work the best for people. And that. And a lot of that is in the book.

John McWhorter (11:01)

Yeah, I think they is. They is great. I first heard it and I thought, that's odd. But then I thought, I'm going to learn to use this because it's long overdue. Yeah. But there are some little suggestions I have to kind of ease its way.

Mike Pesca (11:13)

By the way, the idea of linguists saying and acting as if they're not there to lecture you or tell you what's wrong, how recent a phenomenon is that? Does it align with the Warren Court or other cultural changes?

John McWhorter (11:30)

That's a good one, Mike. Technically, linguists distinguishing themselves from grammarians and saying, what I'm doing is describing what the language is like and celebrating it. That's something that starts bubbling up around the turn of the last century, partly among people who would have called themselves anthropologists but studied Native American languages, which gave a sense of how wide a variety, that gave a sense of how many different ways there are to be a language, and therefore how arbitrary it is to say something like, you can't end a sentence with a preposition in English because they didn't do it in lat. Once you get over the idea that Latin was God's language, then you become more permissive. And H.L. mencken, the journalist, and his take on the American language, as he called it, in these magnificent volumes, you can't read them from COVID to cover, but you can drown in them on a Saturday afternoon. Or at least you would have until the Internet came along. He understood that what you do is describe language rather than making fun of the language. That strays from what's in Webster's. But really the idea that we are solely descriptivists and we don't have any judgments at all. It's funny to read some linguists in the 50s making sniffy little judgments where you think you're a linguist. And then I think, but wait a minute, he's smoking a pipe. And I Love Lucy just appeared on TV. That starts with Chomsky in the 60s, coming up with an extremely sterile, and I mean that in a good way, descriptive sense of how language works. And that's when linguists jump on the idea that all we're doing is describing what comes out of people's mouths, because that's so sophisticated in itself. Of course it does get caught up in politics, but the truth is I always have to be careful because I don't want to insult this person. But then again, he doesn't listen to anything that I'm in. So in linguistics, there is not a single person at even the biggest, most inclusive linguistics conference who would not be what I'm calling a descriptivist, who would not say the idea of Billy and me went to the store is wrong, is nonsense. Everybody down to the human would agree. I can think of one and a half linguists and it's interesting, both of them are card carrying conservatives who still make those kinds of judgments. If you edit something under them, they're correcting you in the way that Mrs. Grundy used to. Only them. And frankly, they're old and nobody likes them. So yes, in linguistics everybody is of that view because it's scientific, it's not politics, although it must seem like it from the outside.

Mike Pesca (14:12)

Nobody likes what they do. Which would be an example of plural. They would not like that sentence.

John McWhorter (14:21)

They think that's wrong.

Mike Pesca (14:22)

Well, if they were just one of them instead of two. One and a half. What is one and a half? Is plural. Isn't that odd? Even fractions are plural. Three quarters is plural.

John McWhorter (14:31)

Yeah, fractions. I never thought about one and a half. Yeah, that's. And you know, these are things people make up. And so it's funny, Strunk and White, who did not say that in particular, everybody loves that book. It was well written. Strunk was a good writer, but that book is just full of stuff. It's just this guy who apparently kind of had an overbite and a high voice, just making some stuff up because that's what he liked. And here we are today thinking that it's authoritative, partly because E.B. white wrote for the New Yorker. It's just a lot of this stuff is just made up. And language is not. It's not a cat show. Or if it is, then we need to say that it's just a cat show. It's supposed to be about describing cat. The analogy is running into a wall. But cat digestion. That's what it's supposed to be.

Mike Pesca (15:17)

Cat gut. Yeah. And it is a little like a game of tennis in that these things are going back and forth. Excellent insight that had never thought of. There are many. And people love these words. Borrowed words from other languages. And you point out much more rare to borrow a verb than a noun. De niro is borrowed. But think of a borrowed Spanish noun. Maybe vamoose. But I can't think of too many. If I think of German words, kindergarten or wanderluster, doppelganger. These are things or sometimes feelings. Right. And the French words are cul de sacs or, or. Or d'oeuvres. However, I was thinking about this. Tell me if this strikes you as plausible. Yiddish has so many verbs that are borrowed to plots, to schwitz, to stop, to finagle. Yiddish, I don't know. I don't think of Yiddish is more active or if there's any reason. And there are a lot of Yiddish works. Bagel that we don't even think of as Yiddish. But it does seem that Yiddish is very verb intensive for our borrowed words. Kvetch.

John McWhorter (16:32)

Mike. That's so true. And it wasn't true of German. It's a Yiddish thing that is a genuine challenge. I've never thought about that. There's probably good dozen Yiddish verbs that are borrowed. And you know, the magazine article about this that I wouldn't write would be about how there was this strong vernacular Yiddish influence on particularly the language of entertainment back starting about 125 years ago. And that. That somehow percolated into real life. But then the question would be why was Al Jolson using the language that way? Why were the people on the Lower east side using English that way? And why did their kids then pick it up? It's one thing if you are more comfortable in Yiddish and you speak English and you sprinkle it with those verbs, that's normal. But then your daughter's English name is Paula. Why did Paula pick that up and start using those words in English? And then why did her daughter Barbara. That's Mike. I'd have to think about it because I'm not gonna just sit here and make something up. Yiddish is an exception there. Of what is considered one of the gold standard tendencies in language change. But yes, with Yiddish, you finagle, you schlepp, you shtup. Yeah, there's a difference there.

Mike Pesca (17:52)

And every day on my show I do the spiel. So this is Yiddish? I believe so. I'm familiar with Yiddish. I think it probably. Well, it may well have to do with vaudeville in that these words. Well, you tell me, when there are borrowed words, de niro means money, right? It doesn't mean pesos, it just. It's an equivalent. But most of these, especially these words that we've talked about from Yiddish, they have slightly different connotations. And does fetch mean purely to complain or is it to complain in a. In a more culturally evocative way and also like a more communal way? I think. Yeah, thank you.

John McWhorter (18:32)

Yeah, it's.

Mike Pesca (18:33)

Or to schlep something. What would the equivalent be? To drag? To lug. I mean, schlep. Kind of confused.

John McWhorter (18:39)

Very specific. Or for example, stup is a word that you think, well, it means fuck, but frankly, there's copulate, which is very clinical. There's fuck, which is really vulgar. Stup is dear. It's kind of cute. You're forgiven for the stupping to an extent. And we've got screw, but you don't forgive for screwing. There are all these other little words, but sht up. I remember the first time I heard it. I don't know if I can say what the context was, but. But stup. I remember thinking, what an affectionate word for it. Whereas English doesn't really have one. And you know, to finagle, once again, you have a very specific sense of it. Also somewhat forgiving. He's a finagler, you know, that sort of thing. What a terrible voice to do. But I like old vaudeville. Maybe it's partly that. Although then of course you say, well, then why not from Japanese? And then again, maybe that's because old Jewish culture was so deeply ensconced in the urban northeastern American culture back in the day. This is worth an article. I wonder who might write this. As time goes by, huh? We'll see.

Mike Pesca (19:47)

Do you? Well, you have many students. You could assign them one. There is another vaudeville related insight that I don't think is in your book. I did read a cover to cover. Maybe I missed it, but it was in. It was in Lexicon Valley. And it was how this is a pronoun insight. How especially Rodney Dangerfield, who is. It just missed vaudeville. Maybe would tell jokes. Like my wife, she.

Rodney Dangerfield (20:13)

My wife and I, we Never have. Now we can undress. We can't stop laughing. You know you can. I know my wife cheats on me every time I come home. The parrot says, quick, out the window.

Mike Pesca (20:22)

You know, we're sitting right on the house. Or where you introduce the pronoun kind of unnecessarily, which is great. Obviously you love Rodney. There are other examples. You played a bunch of songs where someone would introduce a pronoun right after the words that were spoken. So the question isn't, is this right or wrong? Rodney said it, so it must be right. Why do you think it works? What about it serves what he's trying to do?

John McWhorter (20:49)

What that is, is a lot of people think that's wrong to say, but what that is is that what language is based on is you lay out what you're going to say something about, and then you say something about it. Now, we are used to dealing with that in terms of the nice, tidy, very European, frankly, subject, pred. Sentence. The dog went outside. So the dog is. The subject went outside is the predicate. Just as common, and perhaps more common in casual speech in most languages, is that you start with what you're going to talk about, the dog. And then there's the predicate. And the predicate is a whole sentence in itself. The dog, he went outside and he, you know, peed on a tree or something like that. Very natural. If you look at the way people actually speak English, as opposed to the idealized way that we think of it in writing, it's just as common, if not more, for somebody to say, my wife, she doesn't like it when I. When Rodney does that, it's not a rhetorical technique. It's just that he sounded like, I'm about to laugh. I love him. But when he says that, it's just the way people talk. Jack Benny, who was much more formal even, he used that kind of topic comment, as we call it in linguistics construction. So it's not wrong, it's just. It's colloquial. And especially European language speakers have an artificial sense of what real language is based on the way we write it. But it's perfectly natural. And very often this is something that gets too far into the weeds. But you use the pronoun that way so often that often it turns into something else. In many languages, the he becomes just e and then becomes eh. And it just becomes this little bit of stuff that becomes kind of a verb to be in itself, it's just. That's so normal. But in English, we hear it as kind of the wrong thing. My wife, she doesn't like it when I come home. That's the way English is.

Mike Pesca (22:41)

I tell you. My wife, she drives me nuts. She's always taking me to these classy restaurants. I would say if a comedian or if comedians say something and do something, quite often not only can we say it's not wrong, they are if they're good and people respond, they're telling us something about the language and they're telling us if language is a tool. This is a very functional way to use the tool. I mean, in fact, maybe we, especially if we're trying to get a laugh, we should talk like that.

John McWhorter (23:11)

You know, it's. I remember the first time I listened to stand up and was thinking this is real language was one night. It was Eddie Murphy and it was either raw or delirious. Somebody put in something called a videotape and I was frankly high as a kite. I seem to remember this is like 40 years ago. And just watching Eddie talking and I remember thinking so many things that he says and I don't know how much of it he was conscious of are about the subtlety of language. So at one point he has some kid making fun of other kids for being their mother's own welfare. You didn't get. You didn't get. Cause you are on the welfare. And I remember thinking the welfare is less cruel than welfare. You know, if the kids are saying on the welfare, we all know what it is. Maybe we understand it. It's unideal. Your mom is on the welfare. And I thought your mom is on the welfare is different from your mama's on welfare, which would have seemed a little cruel of the kids. And so, you know, that's very subtle.

Mike Pesca (24:25)

The name of the book is Pronoun Trouble, the story of us seven little words. The author is the great John McWhorter. You hear he even does sound effects through his hands on the show. He's a multi, multi talented individual. John, thank you so much.

John McWhorter (24:41)

Mike, thank you very much for this.

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Mike Pesca (25:54)

And now the spiel. A few different friends sent me this great bit that aired on the Daily show from correspondent Michael Costa.

Michael Costa (26:01)

Yo, what's up, finance fam? A lot of volatility in the stock market this week. So I'm hopping on here to help people who only watch Fox News understand what's happening in the market. Let's get started. Real simple formula. When the stock market is down, Fox News only covers trans people playing sports. That's how you know we're bleeding red. I've looked at thousands of hours of this and let me give you a tip. The more obscure the sport, the worse the market is doing.

Mike Pesca (26:25)

Yes, this is in the funny because it's true category. I've watched these segments on Fox News. So his first example predates the market turbulence.

Michael Costa (26:34)

If they're covering a trans swimmer in the NCAA normal market territory, no need to panic. But this week we got a trans fencer at the Cherry Blossom Tournament in Maryland. Lot of Fox coverage on this, which means the Dow is down a full 4%.

Mike Pesca (26:49)

That, by the way, absolutely happened the weekend before April 2nd. And the tariffs. A fencer named Stephanie Turner fenced and then declined to fence because of her opponent. She was days later on Fox News. She made it on the network a few times and it was exactly when the stock market was nosediving.

John McWhorter (27:09)

I think people were a little stunned. I was asked, what are you doing? And I said, I'm a woman and this is a man and I will not fence this individual. This is a women's tournament. And because fencing tournaments are so loud, I don't think Redmond heard me explain that to the referee. So he comes up to me and I explain the same thing to him. And Redmond responds that, you know, there's a USFA board of directors here, there's a policy in place that acknowledges me as a woman. If you refuse defense, you're going to get a black card. You know that, right? And I said, I know.

Mike Pesca (27:54)

Now at the time, I noticed that a lot of outlets, though not Fox, I don't think made it seem that this was a college tournament, one right wing social media influencer posted. Redmond Sullivan is a man pretending to be a woman who used to fence on Wagner College men's team but then switched to the women's. At a USA Fencing event at the University of Maryland over the weekend, Sullivan's female opponent took a knee and refused to fence. Riley Gaines, the activist and former college swimmer who lost a podium spot to Leah Thomas, tweeted, female fencer takes a knee and receives disqualification for refusing to compete against a man competing on the women's team at Wagner College. Yes, the fencer in question did fence, but no longer fences for Wagner College. And yes, the event took place at the University of Mary, but it wasn't a college event. It was just for fun. Turner is 31 years old. If she had faced Sullivan, she might have won. Sullivan wound up winning in that tournament two bouts and losing four against the rest of the draw in the women's foil Open category. So Stephanie Turner certainly trained a lot and wanted to win, but she is an amateur. She's doing it for fun. There's no money on the line, there's certainly no Olympics and she may have won. There was no danger. I mean, stab a bitch and move on. I do think it marks Democrats as a little out of touch to turn a blind eye on this the public sentiment around trans women in sports to insist that natal males don't have any advantage. And by the way, I shall note, natal males is no longer the proper phrase. But when I say trans women, it's clunky. And I'm often talking about girls sports, not women's sports. You have to do too much mental math. And I got a note saying how dare you say natal males. But I think it's accurate. It's not inaccurate. It might be disfavored. So unless someone wants to explain that it's wrong to say that, you know, in the in the womb they have the sex characteristic of males, not men, not gender sex. I'm open to that if I am in fact wrong, but I think I'm strictly speaking accurate here also is always trying to be clear. So anyway, here's my assessment of the politics as a political issue. I don't think it's really the winner that Republicans think it is. Sure it serves the purpose to get some eyeballs, to wrest away some eyeballs during bad Trump news. But people. Are you telling me that people, when they vote in 2026 or 2028 are going to vote? This will be after a lot of high schools do tighten their rules and after a lot of colleges stop giving scholarships to those who the public, most of the public don't believe, earn the scholarships, are you going to tell me that people are still going to be motivated by 31 year old amateur fencers? In this case, Title 9 doesn't even apply. You could plausibly say Title 7 of the Civil Rights act does, but it seems far fetched to me and I do think the Democrats will correct to some degree. Right now if you look at the politics, it seems clear that the Democrats are still flummoxed on the issue. They haven't really sorted out their position and the Republicans are trying or keeping them from sorting it out. The California Legislature considered a change on trans girls playing sports and nothing changed. As KTLA reported, after hours of passionate debate, two GOP backed bills banning transgender athletes from playing on girls sports teams got shut down in Sacramento. The politics at play were not trying to solve the issue. Every Republican already in the minority who spoke of their position wanting to disallow trans girls in sports mockingly evoked Governor Gavin Newsom and his statement that allowing trans girls in sports was an issue of fairness. They were hoping to make Democrats twist as much as they were hoping to actually change the rules more so. And most Democrats were not even tempted to for a second agree with Republicans. Here was Assemblyman Rick Chavez Burr.

Discover Representative (32:05)

This is really reminiscent to me of what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We are, we are moving towards a. We are, we are moving towards autocracy in this country.

Mike Pesca (32:18)

So nothing changed. At least in California. The politicians did not want change. The Republicans wanted as an issue much more than they want to change the situation as an accomplishment. And that is a formula for more and more clamoring over less and less salient examples.

Michael Costa (32:36)

If you see Fox News covering a trans person kicking a hacky sack, the market is cratering. 20 dip in France. 30 dip. The footage is from two years ago. Full blown depression.

Mike Pesca (32:48)

Well, we do seem to have avoided a depression, so I guess the transition World Series of mumbledy peg champion 2021 will be denied their day in the sun. Or at least during the 90 day pause. That's it for today's show. Cory Warra produces the gist. He's a fine mumbledy pager. Michelle Pesk is CBSO of Peach Fish Productions. Improve. Thanks for listen.