In this week’s bonus discussion, guest host Valerie Fridland talks to Jess Zafarris and Shannon Miller about crow behavior, the Cold War deal that gave Pepsi a fleet of warships, and celebrity careers before fame. Then they look at Charles Dickens as a magician and why English didn't have a distinct word for blue until the 1300s.
In this week’s bonus discussion, guest host Valerie Fridland talks to Jess Zafarris and Shannon Miller about crow behavior, the Cold War deal that gave Pepsi a fleet of warships, and celebrity careers before fame. Then they look at Charles Dickens as a magician and why English didn't have a distinct word for blue until the 1300s.
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| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Hi, it's Mignon. Just a quick note. My mom died unexpectedly right before I was supposed to do this interview, but I didn't want Jess and Shannon to lose the chance to tell you about their wonderful book. So my good friend Valerie Fridland, whose work you've also heard on the show many times, generously stepped in to do the interview. This was the last interview of our spring season. So after this, we're already heading into eight weeks of airing some of the best bonus shows that the Grammarpaloozians got right away, and I'm going to really appreciate that little break this time. The Tuesday show will go on as usual because I was a little bit ahead on that. I can't thank Valerie, Jess, Shannon, and everyone at Quick and Dirty Tips enough for swinging into action to get you this episode. And thank you also to everyone who heard the news and sent messages on social media and through Grammarpalooza. It really meant a lot. And now, please do enjoy this conversation about a very fun book.
Valerie Fridland: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians! This is linguist and professor Valerie Fridland, stepping in for Mignon Fogarty, who's taking a bit of needed time after the loss of her mom. Mignon, our thoughts are with you. On the show today, we've been talking to Jess Zafarris and Shannon Miller, authors of the fun new book, "A Miscellany of Weird and Wonderful Facts for Curious Humans Who Have Nothing Better to Do Than Read." You know who you are. So fun to be talking with you today, Jess and Shannon. Now, I will say your book has given me a lot of great fodder and power for my next cocktail party. And one thing I had no idea about was the amazing world of corvids. First of all, I didn't even know what a corvid was, but I also didn't know how smart they seem to be. So let's talk corvids.
Jess Zafarris: Crows and ravens and jays as well belong to the corvid family. Crows and ravens and jays and whatnot are also very intelligent. There's been some amazing research. One of my favorite things about writing this book in particular is I got to investigate a lot of things that I don't normally write about. For what it's worth, I am not a naturalist or a crow scientist of any type or someone who studies corvids. But I did read a good bit about them. I loved finding out that in Kyoto, urban crows will wait at traffic lights with commuters, and that in Alaska, ravens have been filmed pulling fishing lines out of holes in the ice to steal hooked fish, and that Eurasian jays will also select foods based on what they like. Male Eurasian jays in particular watch what their — in a study, they were allowed to watch what their partners ate the most of, and then they selected the foods that they ate the most of in order to feed their potential mate. And then later, when she had apparently grown bored of the first one, they switched up which food they were giving her.
Valerie: Oh my gosh, what a romantic gesture! I needed to have my husband read some of those studies. Bring me my favorite ice cream all the time, and then switch it up with French fries when I grow bored of that. So, quick question on the Kyoto crows that wait at the traffic lights. What are they waiting for? You said they wait with commuters...
Jess: Oh, you're right. I didn't include the best part. They will place nuts on the crosswalk and then let the cars crack them open, then wait at the traffic light and then go in to collect the nuts.
Valerie: Oh my god, that sounds like a little bit of a dangerous endeavor if you're in mid-traffic getting your nuts! But that's still pretty amazing. What brilliant little jays. I had no idea. And one other thing that I had never thought about is the expression "run the gamut." It's a fascinating story of how we got that expression. Could you talk about that for a second?
Jess: I can. It's a little hard to explain, honestly, because I am not music theory-talented enough to get to the heart of this. But when we say something runs the gamut, we say it's the full range of something, right? But "gamut" comes from Guido of Arezzo, who was a Benedictine monk in the 11th century, and he revolutionized how music was taught. He made it easier to memorize music with a system called solmization, which later evolved into the solfège system we know today, which is do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, and then do again, of course. And in Guido's time, it wasn't do, re, mi; it was ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. And it was taken from a Latin hymn that was used on Saint John the Baptist's Day. I'm not going to try reading it, but you are welcome to look this up. Elements in it, like the beginning of each line, are ut, mi, sol, and then halfway through each line we have re, fa, la. The ti syllable was not part of the medieval hexachord, or six-note series, but si was eventually added from the first letters of two of the words in the last line, "Sancte Iohannes." And then in the 1800s, a music teacher named Sarah Glover replaced si with ti so that every syllable could be individually notated by its initial letter. And here's where my expertise runs out, but hopefully, if I'm understanding correctly, the very first note wasn't an A, but was a note below A marked with the Greek letter gamma. So the combination gamma-ut became gamut, the term for the complete range of notes in medieval music.
Valerie: I love it! And now that has nothing to do with notes usually at all. I don't think anybody would have any idea it goes back to a medieval scale for music, which is good because I'm like you — I'm not musically inclined, and so I probably would never have been able to use it in that regard at all. So fascinating. One other detail in your book that really blew my mind was that Pepsi has warships.
Jess: Yes, had warships very briefly. One of the weirdest business deals of the Cold War ended with Pepsi briefly acquiring Soviet submarines and a number of other things. In 1959, Pepsi executive Donald Kendall saw the Soviet Union as a huge untapped market, and at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, he convinced Richard Nixon to introduce Nikita Khrushchev to Pepsi. There were photos of Khrushchev drinking Pepsi published around the world, which gave the company a big publicity victory. And he continued pursuing the Soviet business through the 1960s, but a big obstacle soon emerged. The Soviet ruble could not be freely exchanged on international markets, which meant conventional trade was really difficult. So they bartered instead. In the 1970s, Pepsi supplied cola syrup for bottling in the USSR, and in exchange, the Soviet Union granted Pepsi exclusive American distribution rights for Stolichnaya vodka and Soviet alcoholic beverages. But the tricky part came when Pepsi sales started outpacing vodka sales, and the Soviets needed new goods to offer in exchange for Pepsi. In 1989, they arranged a deal involving decommissioned Soviet military vessels, including 17 submarines and several surface warships. There were so many involved in this deal that Pepsi temporarily — just very briefly — had the sixth-largest military in the world. Sixth or seventh, depending on how you count, because it was about the same size as the Indian Navy at the time. And Donald Kendall, who I mentioned, joked that Pepsi was disarming the Soviet Union faster than the U.S. government in this process.
Valerie: Brings new meaning to the Coke and Pepsi wars, for sure.
Jess: Yes, it does, which Shannon has written about extensively.
Shannon Miller: Yeah.
Valerie: Pepsi had the sixth-largest navy is what you were saying there — but never a shot was fired, if I'm understanding.
Jess: No, they did not use the military.
Valerie: It brings new meaning to "give the world a Coke and a smile," right? If we're going for the diplomatic angle.
Jess: Right.
Valerie: OK, so just speaking of celebrities — which those two were — I also really enjoyed learning about some of the earlier hobbies and careers of some celebrities and authors. Can you talk a little bit about some of the most surprising ones that you found?
Shannon: Oh, 100 percent. Danny DeVito as a hairdresser blows me over every time because I love Danny DeVito and I would never associate him being in a salon. It's funny because a lot of these celebrities — you know, we grow up with them. In terms of their position in the public eye, we know some of these from when I was like 2 or 3 years old, so you don't think of the before-times, before they were in the public eye. But a lot of them just had normal careers. Like Burt Reynolds was a police officer — famously known as a Florida State alumnus, Go Noles! He was the big Noles celebrity for us. And yeah, he was a police officer before he was the Burt Reynolds. Hugh Jackman was a clown for hire, and now he's all over Broadway. So seeing these really cool threads to a former life show up in these new grandiose ways is pretty cool. Simon Cowell as an ax polisher — that makes sense, somehow.
Valerie: That I can see!
Shannon: You can totally see it! Christopher Walken as a lion tamer's assistant. These are the unique odd jobs they took just to sustain themselves and get to where they are — that's always really cool to examine.
Valerie: And you also had some writers who had some really interesting backstories or before-times jobs. What was your favorite in terms of what writers did before they became writers?
Jess: For me, I would probably say it was Charles Dickens as a magician. That's the one that stands out.
Valerie: I like that one a lot. And I think that one kind of fits when you think about what he's written. I can sort of see him also being a magician. But a lot of these are jobs you wouldn't think of anybody having, right? Who becomes a clown or a magician — or a lion tamer's assistant? It's funny that they fall into these little jobs that are so eclectic.
Shannon: I didn't even know lion tamers needed assistants.
Valerie: Well, I think you always have to have a backup in that job. Oh my goodness. OK, so I love learning about the history of color terms. Anything related to color term history is something I am interested in automatically. I'm also fascinated by the way that colors are perceived differently cross-culturally, how we see them. And so you talk a little bit about the color blue in the book, and the show has already talked some about the difference between Russian concepts of blue and English concepts of blue, and how they have different terms for light blue and dark blue. But you also have some other interesting blue facts in your book.
Jess: This is an interesting one, and I'm sure that you have encountered this too — it's easy for people to get a little bit up in arms when you say that English didn't have a specific, distinct word for the color blue until like the 1300s. I think the concern is that we didn't have a word for blue. We did have words for blue. Those words were colexified. We used the word "yellow" for lots of pale shades, including blues and grays and greens and things like that. And then words like "gray" also could encompass blues. We just didn't get this singular, distinctive word for this one color until later. And that's how color names work in general. We start out with names for dark and light, and then we have words for red, and then we have words for green things, and we go outward from our environment and then get more and more specific over time. And I think that's probably frustrating for designers, because you want to click the hex code and you can be like, "This is a different color than this." But at the same time, we still do it. We consider pink a different color than light red, even if it's the same distance on the color wheel as, say, light blue and dark blue — which are considered both blue — whereas pink is considered a different color than red because we've attached cultural associations to it. But many cultures also approach color distinctions very differently. These are colexified. That means that people use a single word to cover multiple concepts. In this case, one of the more common ones is blue and green — there's a Tibetan word that covers the color of the sky and the color of some types of plants. And then there's a Japanese word that covers the sky but also covers green traffic lights and some green vegetation. Apparently, that's a bit of a generational thing, too. And then there's another distinct word for green, but the older one is more colexified. In Russian, light blue is considered a separate color from dark blue — sort of like our pink-red distinction. And then in Korea, there is a word that can cover a blue sky or a green forest. And ancient Egyptians had words that covered green and blue hues as well. There's a goddess — Wadjet — who is typically represented with blue colors but is literally called "the green one." So we've got all kinds of confusion over those two across cultures. And of course, there are cultures that have more words for green than we think we need. So it's all association-based, and there's a lot of nuance there.
Valerie: Fascinating. I love the color terms and the way that we look at them differently — it's such an interesting area for me as a linguist. I love that you put that in the book. Well, it's been so fascinating learning all these facts and factoids from you today. I learned a lot from reading this book, and I'm definitely going to be a much more entertaining cocktail party conversationalist after this. Before we leave, though, I want to get some book recommendations from each of you — books that you would give as a gift or that you just couldn't put down. How about we start with you, Jess? What are your top three?
Jess: All right. My top three: I've been trying to branch out from my usual genres. I'll start with a nonfiction book I read recently. I've been reading a lot more narrative nonfiction — and not just this wonderful one written by a mysterious person who may or may not be in this room. But beyond that, I will not recommend linguistic or word-related books because I'm sure they are recommended regularly on this podcast. Instead, I will recommend "Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History" by Dan Flores. It's wonderful. It talks about the relationship between humans and coyotes. We've done, unfortunately, a really good job of exterminating wolves from many areas, but coyotes have continued to thrive and have a strong cultural history with humans as well. He covers both the folkloric and the natural history of coyotes in a really beautiful way. Another one that I read recently — back to my usual genres, which are fantasy, horror, sci-fi and things like that — I would highly recommend "The Tainted Cup" and its sequels by Robert Jackson Bennett. Imagine murder mysteries in another world where the cities are threatened by leviathans. And then another one I would recommend — and I would recommend the physical version of this because it has some really interesting illustrations — is "Horrorstör" by Grady Hendrix. It is a horror story, and it has an umlaut over the O in "Horrorstör" because it takes place in an IKEA-like warehouse.
Valerie: Oh, I love it! I'm definitely picking up a couple of those. I need some good reads this summer, especially for all the plane rides. And Shannon, what are your favorites?
Shannon: I have been digging into two separate subject matters. One being grammar — and obviously reading books from my incredible co-author, Jess Zafarris, so "Useful Etymology," "Books from Hell," obviously, highly recommended always. But stepping away from language, I've been digging into the world of fashion, trying to understand the psychology of it and how it shows up in our world, especially in the world of luxury fashion. I've been learning a lot specifically from "The Little Book" series. If you go into a TJ Maxx or a HomeGoods, when you're looking for random home decor, we speed right past the books. You shouldn't! There are so many really cool books about design and fashion and things that can help you understand why you're choosing those things in HomeGoods. So there's "The Little Book" series on fashion — it's literally a little book that goes into different designers. The one I just read was "Yves Saint Laurent" by Emma Baxter-Wright, and it's been extremely helpful in distilling this huge legacy into a little book. You're not going to learn every single thing under the sun, but you're going to understand why that brand is the way it is, what the psychology was in building it, and the house codes — little things like bows. You see a little bow and you don't realize, "Oh, that's a Chanel staple." It's really cool to be able to dig into that. I am also going to cheat a little bit and plug a very dear friend of mine, Stephanie Williams, who is an incredible, now Eisner-nominated comic book writer. "Roots of Madness" is a really cool series — it's a horror retelling of the life of Madam C.J. Walker. And this is definitely bordering on a young adult book, but I do love reading the "Shine" and "Bright" series by Jessica Jung, who was a former K-pop idol who went into fashion. She wrote this fictional book about the K-pop industry following a girl going through the system. It's one of those things where it's very enjoyable, calorie-free reading, but also kind of a look at the K-pop system. And as a K-pop fan, it's really interesting to see how this system has built this incredibly popular, now global genre. When you get past the fun, fictional narrative bits, it does give you an inside look at what it takes to become a K-pop idol. It's very involved, a deeply webbed system that requires a lot of work. It's really great insight, and even if you're not big into gossip, it's still very interesting to look at. So those are my three.
Valerie: Oh, I love it. Well, I was thinking K-pop for my next career, so I'm definitely going to be reading that one. I need some pointers.
Shannon: Go for it! I believe in you.
Valerie: Well, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for coming on the show with me.
Jess: This has been amazing. Thank you, Valerie.
Shannon: Thank you for having us.