I won’t do this, but wouldn’t be funny if I started every episode with the Eagles fight song Your Daily Lex So, uh already people are like ready to move on from the Eagles Super Bowl victory is a story Not me.

We’re world champions Take that Neptune.

But yeah, I don’t know.

I Still excited about it so pleased but I thought I would tell a story completely unrelated to the Super Bowl From college.

I was linguistics and cognitive science major Which I talked about recently when I was interviewed on the grammar girl podcast and a local friend of mine Andy was like he’s guest hosted this show once he was like, I didn’t even know that I know nothing about you I feel like everybody knows that was a Linguistics major so the fact that Andy didn’t surprise me But when I was a linguistics major Brandeis, first of all, there were not very many of us like fewer than 15 total majors Students taking that major and now Brandeis or at least the last time I checked doesn’t even offer linguistics and cognitive sciences major I liked it for several reasons including the fact that it sounds like a double major Oh, I majored in linguistics and cognitive science, but it was just the one thing But one of the classes I took shockingly was intro to linguistics And that was one of those huge classes big seminar style class in a giant theater style classroom And then of course it gets smaller and smaller as time goes by Not in that class, but in successive linguistic classes because now there’s much fewer people taking it.

But anyway my professor was a woman named Joan mailing and There was an early assignment and this was you know The internet existed but the internet like it feels like it had like a couple hundred websites You couldn’t look up everything there and the assignment came through List every phonetic sound phonetic consonant sound list every consonant sound that exists in the English language Don’t worry about the vowel but list every consonant sound and I took this assignment seriously and You know, I was using I don’t even know what app it would have been Maybe Claris works, but I was using some word processing app and I really made it look beautiful, right?

Like there was no bounds in terms of what the assignment was meant to look like So I had this this chart two columns were like on the left was the my representation of the sound In letter form and then on the right it was like examples like your words where you can get that sound from and You know, you’ve got your obvious ones.

You’ve got your buzz and your cuz and your sis But then I was like, you know, there’s CH and SH and then there’s two different versions of TH There’s the TH that’s like in throw but also the TH that’s in that a different sound and I’m really going crazy And I list every single one that I can come up with These times are turned in and then it’s a week or two later and I have one of those moments one of those moments where I’m in the class and the TA is speaking and he’s like Professor Milly was very impressed with One of you in particular who listed every single consonant sound that does exist in the English language And I’m like, well, no way it was me.

I mean, I only had 30 something whatever I don’t know.

I made up that number just now but You know, so Lex Friedman if you’re here, could you please stand up and I was like, I’m not gonna stand up nope, that’s really this is awkward Wow and It’s like oh is Lex Friedman not here and I’m like, oh my god, I can’t have to think I’m not here So then I do get up so then I’m also like the weirdo who didn’t stand up the first time but whatever And he makes the whole class which is like a couple hundred kids applaud for me And then when we collected our assignments later He did say the only mistake you had was that you listed one sound that you had already listed because it’s really a combination of two other sounds and I actually blamed my own name for it because I had listed X as its own consonant sound and of course It’s not because X is really KS You can spell my name le KS, please don’t the other guy should but yeah, I That came up recently in a conversation with Sierra and I thought I would share the story with you in this my newfound quest To always have fun topics to cover on the show.

This might be college week Who knows I got a bunch of college stories listed in my note So we’ll see of course if you have questions or topics you’d like me to tackle on your daily Lex Bribe me or just write to me on social media.

You can find me.

I’m on the good platforms.

Not the bad ones And if you need to know any English consonant sounds I got your back Lex