Have a topic I want to talk about today But I can’t talk about it yet today because I have to keep the thing under wraps and it’s not like it’s the world’s most Exciting things sometimes people are like, oh, here’s this really exciting thing coming and I can’t tell you and it’s like a big deal This is not a big deal It’s just like cute and funny, but I have to wait until the podcast episode involved is released and then I can give you the story So I can’t do that yet Instead let’s go back to the YDL note one of my oldest notes in the notes app and man according to my device I have one thousand three hundred thirty-two notes In iCloud and one thousand two hundred one notes not in iCloud Wow I have a lot of notes you guys but I’m going to the YDL notes and we’re gonna talk a little bit more about College I told you about nair yesterday there today gone tomorrow.

Haha.

Here we go your Daily Lex I mentioned recently that I was a linguistics major linguistics and cognitive science, which shocked some of you.

But anyway, I Had some of the greatest classes I had a semantics class with a professor Edgar Zerif You probably did diagramming sentences at some point in school the diagramming sentences you do in linguistics in the field of syntax It’s harder.

Let me be clear.

But man Edgar Zerif this professor who would always wear sweaters He would always stand too close to his chalkboard which was actual chalk and rub the chalk all over his sweater And then you couldn’t he was on the board anymore But he also because he was constantly analyzing the structure of his sentences he would get lost in them they would have sub clauses and subordinate clauses and other clauses and he would Freeze up while speaking.

I think is his brain worked to parse the syntax of his own sentences while he spoke it was fascinating he was brilliant and funny and Clearly a misanthrope like I wouldn’t even say he hated just humanity I think he just hated but he was also lovely.

It’s very weird.

Very weird mix.

I like that class hard man, I I kind of want to tell you about some of the things we were talking about in that class, but so Basically, they do these studies where they can show you a word on a screen while you’re on headphones hearing other stuff and Sometimes they show you a word and sometimes they show you a non word and you have to press a button saying yeah I recognize that’s a word or yeah, that’s not a word and Your brain can recognize words faster when what you’re hearing is related to those words so, you know if they say Fish in your ears or they’re talking about fishing and you see the word bowl as in fish bowl You’ll respond to it more quickly.

If you see salmon, you’ll respond to it more quickly and They show how the synapses and neural pathways of how words are connected in your brain are closer you know that relevant words are closer to each other, but what’s fascinating about this in the study of syntax is Your brain doesn’t know how the word is gonna be used in the sentence yet So if you hear school and we show you the word fish or we show you the word education You’ll recognize them both really quickly because your brain doesn’t yet know which meaning of school we mean crazy But that’s not what I wanted to talk about that’s just a fun aside and you probably don’t find it interesting because you weren’t a linguistics major I’m guessing but in Semantics and boy did professor Ray Jack and off Unfortunate name did he hate when people would say things like oh, it’s just semantics because he thinks semantics It’s like a whole thing which it is But in those classes we would talk about we would have class-long debates for three hours about the difference between a stool and a chair or the difference between a chair and a bench because people think about a stool and They’re like, oh, well stool has three legs and a chair has four but some stools have four legs Oh, well stool is backless, but that’s not always true.

Some stools have backs The Chair and a bench.

Well a bench can hold two people and or more and a chair can hold one So what is it if it holds one and a half people or 1.25 people or 1.8 people at what point does a chair become?

A bench we had whole classes about chair versus seat I’m sure I’ve talked about this on the podcast before but in chair versus seat, you know, it’s You know, it’s seats in a movie theater seats on an airplane It’s you know chairs if they load them into the assembly room or whatever and what we came down to was if it’s mounted to The floor, it’s a seat and if it’s not it’s a chair Which implies that the electric chair should really be called the electric seat.

I Also wrote a giant thesis on the grammar of African American vernacular English I know I’ve talked about this on the podcast before I’ve talked about it in multiple podcasts before It was commonly and somewhat offensively known as ebonics, but African American vernacular English a a VE for short Follows a lot of the same grammar rules as French and man.

I thought that was so cool when we learned about that So anyway, those are some of the fun things that you study as a linguistics major and boy, it has helped me so much my career Anyway, happy Wednesday.

Goodbye Lex