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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 60: That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 60: That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 60 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about space between words and affixes, also known as clitics. But first, we have an announcement. We’re doing a special drive to encourage people to become patrons of Lingthusiasm this month.

Gretchen: If you’ve been meaning to become a patron and just never quite gotten around to it, now is a great chance to join. We’re gonna be sending out packs of four Lingthusiasm stickers to everyone who’s a patron at the Ling-phabet tier on November 3, 2021.

Lauren: This is going to be a Lingthusiasm logo sticker, two different versions of our “Schwa, Never Stressed” stickers in different colours, and a bookplate sticker for Because Internet, which Gretchen is going to sign for you.

Gretchen: Yes, I am. Make me sign a lot of stickers. You can stick these stickers on your laptop, your water bottle, anywhere else you wanna have an excuse to bring up how cool linguistics is in polite company.

Lauren: If you’re already a patron at a lower level, first of all, thank you! And second, this is a great reason to upgrade as there are some cool things available, especially if you stick around in this tier, including your name and favourite IPA character on our Supporter Wall of Fame.

Gretchen: If you don’t already have a favourite IPA character, you can take our extremely scientific “Which IPA Character are You” quiz and find out.

Lauren: We hand choose all the IPA characters for our supporters on the Wall of Fame.

Gretchen: From the results of this highly scientific quiz.

Lauren: Plus, you also get a “Lingthusiast” sticker after three months of this tier that Patreon sends you.

Gretchen: That’s so many stickers. That’s five stickers. Two different things in the mail.

Lauren: If you’re already supporting us at this level or a higher level, you also get the sticker pack, and we’ll be sending you a message to remind you to make sure your address is up-to-date so we know where to send those stickers. Finally, all patrons at all levels, we appreciate you so much. As we say every episode, it’s our patrons who keep the show ad-free and who also get access to monthly bonus episodes, including our most recent, Number 54, an interview with Emily Gref of Planet Word. You also have access to our Discord to chat with other Lingthusiasm and linguistics fans.

Gretchen: We had a really fun time talking with Emily from Planet Word. Hopefully, we’ll get to check out that museum at some point. So, go listen to that.

[Music]

Gretchen: Okay, Lauren, I have a sentence for you and a task, if you’re okay with that.

Lauren: Yep. Sounds very exciting.

Gretchen: I’m gonna give you a sentence, and then in this sentence, I want you to identify the words and the affixes. That’s prefixes and suffixes.

Lauren: I’m gonna grab two different coloured pens. I’m very excited.

Gretchen: This is one of those Grade 8 English class underlining things.

Lauren: This is why I love linguistics puzzles. You get to crack out the coloured pens.

Gretchen: Exactly. The sentence is, “Later today, I’ll know if I hafta get some prizes for Helen of Troy’s competition, or if it isn’t necessary.”

Lauren: Before I even begin to pull this wonderful sentence apart, can we just revel in the fact that so many sentences that get said have never been said in the history of humanity before.

Gretchen: I’m pretty sure that this one has not been said in the history of humanity before.

Lauren: I like this sub-story of The Iliad that I’ve never heard before. I’ll go with it. I have an advantage that I am looking at this sentence on a piece of paper. I’m pulling out lots of words. “Prizes” is a word. But I can pull “prizes” apart because I can have “prize” and then the plural S. “Prize” gets one colour, and the S gets another colour. We’ve also got “competition.” I know “com-” is a prefix, and “-tition” is a suffix that can change the word.

Gretchen: So maybe like “compete” and “-tition” or something like that?

Lauren: Yeah. We have a whole episode on morphemes and how they build up into words. We’ll link to that in the show notes. I feel pretty comfortable with the things that are words, and I feel pretty comfortable pulling out things that are affixes. But, Gretchen, I only have two colours of pen, and I’ve got some words that I’m a bit stuck on.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: “Hafta,” as you have pronounced it and as it’s written – H-A-F-T-A.

Gretchen: As I very carefully said “hafta,” which is not my usual reading vocabulary, but there we are.

Lauren: Casually carefully you pronounced it. I know that that is an informal pronunciation of “have to” – “I have to get” – but it’s one of those things that everyone does. It’s so common. I want to kind of treat “hafta” like a single word. I’m a bit stuck on that one.

Gretchen: But you’re not sure if you’re gonna but you just sort of wanna just to put a few more in there.

Lauren: Yes. I’m gonna put “hafta” with a bit of a question mark. I’m gonna add “I’ll” to that category because, again, that “-ll” at the end of “I’ll” – I know and you know that that’s a conjoined form there. It’s normally “will” as a full thing, but it can just as easily be “I’ll.” I feel like “-ll” is kind of an affix, but it’s more word-y than an affix.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because for something like “prizes,” you don’t know where the /z/ is coming from. There’s not some other word that you know where it’s from.

Lauren: Exactly. Then, “Helen of Troy’s” is an interesting phrase because it’s got that /s/ on the end, but unlike the /s/ in “prizes,” it’s relating to the whole of “Helen of Troy’s.” It’s not just relating to Troy there. Again, question mark on that one. And the “-n’t” in “isn’t” is a bit like the “-ll” in “I’ll.”

Gretchen: We’ve got three tricky things at the boundaries which I have to confess that I carefully constructed this sentence to make it a tricky situation because we wanna talk today about what’s going on with things that are kind of word-like but also kind of affix-like and are in that tricky boundary in between the two. We’ve got a few examples like, “I’ll, “hafta,” “Helen of Troy’s,” and “isn’t.”

Lauren: We not only have talked about morphemes in an episode, we’ve talked about words. We’ve talked about whether something is a word or not in a way that was really focused on meaning. For these, a lot of it is not so much about meaning but about the shape of the affix or the shape of the word that it would’ve been as a full word. It’s revisiting that topic but from a different perspective.

Gretchen: I think the thing that’s satisfying to me is that these nebulously defined word and affix-y-like things have a name for them which is not as well-known as “word” or “affix,” these well-known things, but they’re called “clitics.” When we were preparing for this episode, we were looking up, “Okay, what is the formal definition for ‘clitic’ anyway? Surely someone’s written this. We can just read it out.” The answer is that linguists disagree.

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: Linguists disagree a lot about exactly what a clitic is precisely because it occupies that interesting space between, you know, here are these things that you can very clearly say them all by themselves in isolation like “I” and “will” and “is” and “not,” and then here are these things that you very clearly have to put them on a word. They’re incoherent without a word. And then some stuff that floats around the sentence that you’re like, “Okay, maybe this is a full word. Maybe it’s attached to something else.” It’s a little bit unclear what the status is. Different clitics can behave in different ways, and they can all be lumped together as here’s this big category of stuff that we don’t know what to do with. Or you can be someone who’s really a splitter and saying, “Okay, no, these ones, I think they are more like actual affixes, and these ones, I think they are more word-y, and these are the true clitics that are the smaller set in the middle.” It really depends on if you wanna be a lumper or a splitter there.

Lauren: In order to decide what is and isn’t a clitic, you have rules and principles that are specific to the language that you’re talking about. When it comes to drilling into the specifics of English and how the grammar of English works, you can’t get much more drilling down and specificity in a single book than the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. It’s time for another episode of Gretchen’s adventures in CGEL.

Gretchen: I have a massive copy of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. It’s over a thousand pages. It has made an appearance in some previous Lingthusiasm episodes because it’s got these very, very detailed descriptions of various aspects of what’s going on in English.

Lauren: When it comes to a phenomenon like clitics where there’s a lot of slightly different things happening between different examples, something that has a lot of detail is exactly what we need.

Gretchen: Right. One of the things that CGEL talks about with respect to clitics is that there’s a grade in English between the ones that have very a restricted set of places where they can be found and ones that have a bit less restriction in terms of where they can be found. Even within clitics there are immediately, as soon as you get there, subcategories. One of those is – so clitic forms of “am,” “are,” “have,” and “will,” attach only to a subject pronoun rather than to a full noun. You can have “I’m,” “we’re,” “they’ve,” “he’ll.” CGEL says that if you have a compound subject with a noun and a pronoun in it – like a longer thing but it still has a pronoun – you don’t generally get something like, “Joe and you are in for a shock” – “Joe and you’re in for a shock.” I don’t think I’d say that.

Lauren: You actually struggled to say it. You didn’t even get it right the first time.

Gretchen: I read it on the page, and I was like, “No, I can totally say that.” Then I’m reading it out loud, and I’m like, “No, I can’t actually say, ‘Joe and you’re in for a shock.” Maybe I can say, “Both of you’ve been pretty inconsiderate.”

Lauren: [Laughs] “Both of you’ve been pretty inconsiderate.” It definitely sounds like you’re squishing two different sentences together that don’t belong together.

Gretchen: What do you think about “The Smiths will be there, and so’ll I.”

Lauren: Oh, that one actually is less bad.

Gretchen: I don’t mind that as much. You can use something like, “Pat’ll do it.” You could put it on just a noun by itself, but if you have the compound subject –

Lauren: It gets a little bit less pleasant to my intuitions.

Gretchen: “Joe and you’re in for a shock” just really doesn’t work for me, actually.

Lauren: Which is impressive that it’s getting stronger as it’s not working for you because, normally, once you’ve been exposed to these things for a while, you’re like, “Maybe? I don’t know anymore.”

Gretchen: You can put it on something like, “You could’ve been hurt,” the “-ve” works there. The one that I find more fun – and this one is less restricted. Clitic forms of “is” and “has” – you can put them in a lot of places. You have something like, “Jean’s here,” and “Jean’s taken it,” which actually sounds the same as “jeans” like the pants.

Lauren: That is true.

Gretchen: That really works. You can also put it on longer phrases which don’t work as well for “are” or “have.” You can say something like, “Which dog’s been on the sofa?” Sounds fine to me. “That they’re wet’s obvious enough.”

Lauren: “I’m gonna have to put them in the drier because that they’re wet’s obvious enough.”

Gretchen: “What do you think’s gonna happen?” Totally fine for me.

Lauren: Absolutely.

Gretchen: “Ed, I think, is going, and so’s Sue.”

Lauren: Great. Looking forward to seeing them there.

Gretchen: “Why’s this happening?” “What the heck’s she’s doing?” All of these – totally fine. You’re like, “Yeah, I can put ‘is’ and ‘has’ anywhere. It’s fine.” And then they point out that there are some bad examples.

Lauren: Okay. Please break my brain.

Gretchen: What do you think about “What salad’s that man over there eating?”

Lauren: “What salad’s that man over there eating?” That works for me.

Gretchen: This one is with a percent sign. Some people have it and some people don’t. I find it not quite as good as the others, but I think I’m okay with it. “Don’t use more force than’s absolutely necessary.”

Lauren: “Don’t use more force than’s absolutely necessary.”

Gretchen: I don’t think you like that one.

Lauren: No, that’s weird.

Gretchen: That’s also a percent sign one. Some people might like it. Some people might not.

Lauren: Yeah, I should say it’s weird for me.

Gretchen: I think maybe I can get it but maybe not. Maybe my impressions are just broken from reading this book. Here’s one they don’t think people are gonna be able to get and that’s, “Never’s it going to be easier.”

Lauren: “Never’s it going to be easier.” It definitely is a bit trip-y up-y.

Gretchen: What do you think about, “She often’s right about things.” [Pause] [Gretchen laughs]

Lauren: Is that one a percent?

Gretchen: No. That one is star. That one is nobody.

Lauren: Okay, I am relieved.

Gretchen: “Never’s” is also nobody, but “She often’s right about things” and “Never’s it gonna be easier.” Yet, “She often is right about things,” that would be fine.

Lauren: Fine.

Gretchen: This brings us to a post that went viral from Tumblr a while back. This was somebody – just-shower-thoughts – observing that “Contractions function almost identically to the full two-word phrase, but are only appropriate in some places in a sentence. It’s one of the weird quirks of this language we’ve.”

Lauren: It’s because “have” there is being used as an auxiliary instead of the full form of having and ownership.

Gretchen: Maybe. What do you think about a further comment on it? “Some people say the English language is confusing. To which I say…It’s.”

Lauren: That one definitely feels like it’s missing another word at least.

Gretchen: I’m very delighted that I added a comment to it myself, four years ago, and that that has gotten picked up in the form that keeps getting screen capped and passed around which was, “That’s the kind of linguist I’m.”

Lauren: That absolutely does not work. Congratulations on making more than one sentence that has broken my brain this episode.

Gretchen: It actually took me quite a long time to come up with that sentence, so I’m really pleased.

Lauren: I do see that circulating occasionally. It’s very satisfying.

Gretchen: Yeah, every so often I see it, and I’m like, “Oh, that was me.” I think it also speaks to a really interesting point about clitics in general because sometimes one of the things that comes up when you’re talking about reduced forms of words or smooshing words together, people will start saying like, “Oh, these are lazy,” or “These are low effort. Why are people doing this low effort thing? Shouldn’t everyone just be talking in full words with lots of pauses in between them like a robot?”

Lauren: I absolutely refer to your example as having casual features of English. That’s a slightly less judge-y way of saying the same thing.

Gretchen: Right. But the thing that’s really interesting is there are these kinds of constraints. Nobody who is saying “I’m” and “I’ll” and “I’ve” and all of these things that everyone says is doing it in this weird position at the end of the sentence.

Lauren: If it was just about laziness and efficiency, you’d expect it to be able to be used everywhere.

Gretchen: Right! You’d expect it to just be like, “Okay, yeah, we’ve just gonna do this low effort thing,” but it’s actually more effort, at least to some subconscious level, to be keeping track of like, “Okay, yeah, you can do this reduction thing in some places but not in other places.” Imagine trying to explain that to a new speaker of like, “Oh, yeah, well, no, we have this abbreviation form, but actually it’s never put here.” Like, “Wait, why? This is an extra thing to pay attention to.” There’s a lot of interesting subtle things going on in terms of where we use them.

Lauren: I hadn’t even thought about the restrictions that clitic forms in English have until you showed me places they shouldn’t be.

Gretchen: I hadn’t thought of them either. This is why you go consult a grammar because they’ve gone through all this effort to make all these beautiful, ungrammatical sentences for you. Reading CGEL about clitics also reminded me of this other thing that’s below the level of fully conscious speech in English which is that there’s a certain set of words that have stronger and weaker forms – shorter and longer forms – at a sound level.

Lauren: Because one of the features of a clitic is that it is reduced in terms of its sound compared to a full word.

Gretchen: Exactly. You don’t get a clitic that’s four syllables long because at the point when it’s becoming a clitic, it’s already, like, maybe doesn’t even have a vowel in it.

Lauren: When “will” attaches to something else a clitic to make “-ll.” You never wanna say it can’t happen because then there’ll be one example from someone somewhere, but it would be supremely unusual for something to be a clitic and then become a lot longer.

Gretchen: I think it would be weird because the words that tend to become clitics are already words that have become grammatical words and that are really high frequency. Those tend to be short as well. I mean, never say never. Maybe there’s some language that does it. But I think it would be uncommon. This gets us into this question of what are words that are potentially good targets to become clitics. These are often words that are already getting smaller phonologically. In CGEL they talk about weak versus strong forms of certain words.

Lauren: I don’t think I’ve had someone put this like this before. What would an example of that look like?

Gretchen: Their example is “I think Pat has seen it” and “I haven’t seen it, but Pat has.”

Lauren: I don’t even know what I’m listening for there.

Gretchen: You’re listening for the word “has.” “I think Pat /əz/ seen it.” “I haven’t seen it, but Pat /hæz/.”

Lauren: That’s the difference between /həz/ and /hæz/.

Gretchen: And even shorter because the “Pat has seen it” is often just /əz/.

Lauren: Ah, yeah.

Gretchen: There’s an H written there, but “Pat /əz/” – you probably don’t even say it. Then “has” has that H, and it has a full vowel, not this tiny schwa, and then they both have the /z/ there. There’s actually quite a difference in terms of how they’re pronounced. There’s about 50 words that CGEL lists that have one or more weak forms as well as a strong form. It’s gonna actually be weird to read this list because I’m gonna have to read these words in strong form because you would say them in strong form in isolation because isolation is one of the environments where you use the strong form of a word.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: This is words like “a” –

Lauren: As in, like, “a car”?

Gretchen: Yeah, “a car.” “Am.”

Lauren: “I’m.”

Gretchen: “I’m.” “And.”

Lauren: /ənd/

Gretchen: Yeah. Or just /ən/.

Lauren: To the point where English speakers do the little /ən/ between words.

Gretchen: “Fish ‘n chips.” I’m not gonna read the whole list. You can see that there’s sort of, like, “a” and “am” and “and” are all different types of things. One of them is a verb. One of them is a conjunction. One of them is an article – a determiner. There’s a bunch of different categories. You have some prepositions like “for” which could be “for” but also –

Lauren: /fə/.

Gretchen: /fɹ̩/. You have stuff like “of,” “my,” “must,” “me,” “who,” “you,” which can become /jə/. These are all small words. All of them are a single syllable. If they begin with H, the H often gets kicked off.

Lauren: The thing I really like about “a” or “an” on that list, like “a prize,” is that this is part of an ongoing journey for that word. Because that word started off as “an,” which was essentially the word “one.” Then “one” went off in one direction with all of its articulation still, and then “an” became “a” and is now just /ə/. It’s why you get things like /əloʊn/.

Gretchen: Exactly. Or “only” because it was /oʊn/. The fun thing is, is “a” can be reduced to just /ə/, but /əv/ can also be reduced is just /ə/. “To” can also be reduced to just /ə/. You have gonna /gənə/, lotta /latə/ – “a lot of things” – /gənə/, /goʊ/. All of them can get reduced because they all occur in such different environments that it’s never ambiguous which one is which. What’s interesting is that if a word becomes a clitic – it’s because a lot of the English words started out as a weak form of a word and then subsequently became a clitic.

Lauren: The thing that makes me so happy about this is when we started this episode, I thought we were gonna look at what was between an affix and a word and that that was gonna be clitics. Now, I find out there’s a thing between clitics and words and that everything is on these processes. There are multiple steps that you can watch happen.

Gretchen: The thing that’s interesting about the steps is they interact. Something can become a clitic if it’s already in the weak form. It can become even weaker and become a clitic and really hang onto or lean onto the word next to it. But the reason why you can’t say something like, “That’s the kind of linguist I’m,” is because you can’t even use the weak form of “am” at the end of a word like that.

Lauren: How satisfying.

Gretchen: This was our “I haven’t seen it, but Pat has.” You also can’t say, “I haven’t seen it, but Pat’s.”

Lauren: No. Because I don’t even know what that /s/ is there.

Gretchen: Yeah. But “I think Pat’s seen it” – fine. “I haven’t seen it, but Pat’s.” This context forces you to use the strong form of a word, which means it’s not even a possible target for becoming a clitic, which is one of those subconscious things that you’re like “I didn’t even know I knew this.”

Lauren: I do feel like a lot of not ever noticing this phenomenon of weak forms is because we are so dependent on English writing for the way we conceptualise words even when we hear them. If you’re a very literate English speaker, your perception of the written form can play tricks on your brain in terms of the pronounced form.

Gretchen: I said, “I think Pat /əz/ seen it” to you several times, and you were like, “Yeah, the H is still there,” and I’m like, “I’m not saying an H.” Because the writing is like, “Hey, look, there’s an H.” It’s just not there.

Lauren: Absolutely hallucinated that H there.

Gretchen: The fun thing is, is not every language does this. When I was studying Dutch for a bit, one of the things that was fascinating to learn was that they actually do have different spellings for strong and weak forms of their pronouns.

Lauren: So good.

Gretchen: For example, the Dutch word for “me,” which is – you’ll be able to see the cognates with English – can be written M-I-J, which is pronounced /me/, or it can be written M-E, which is pronounced /mə/. This is probably true of English as well. There’s an emphasis given to “me” and then like, “Yeah, he gave it to me, and then whatever.” There’s probably a /mə/ form in English as well, but they’re both written the same way. You do sometimes see this for pronouns, especially for third person pronouns. Like, “Give it to ‘im,” “Give it to ‘er,” “Give it to ‘em.’” You sometimes see those written with an apostrophe instead of the H, but it’s not something you get a table of like, “Make sure you learn these weak forms,” in the same way as Dutch.

Lauren: No, I absolutely have not.

Gretchen: There is a fun story with, actually, this “‘em,” if you say something like, “Go get ‘em.” What does that E-M stand for?

Lauren: “Them.” Because it’s third person plural.

Gretchen: Well, you’d think because that’s what our modern third person plural is. But in what other context do we drop a /ð/ sound?

Lauren: It’s true. It’s not one of those easy-to-loose sounds.

Gretchen: Right. We have a strong and a weak form of “the.” You have /ðʌ/ or /ði/. Then you have /ðə/. But when you’re reducing it, you’re reducing the vowel. You’re not taking it down to /i/.

Lauren: True.

Gretchen: The “‘em” is actually a form of “hem,” which was the object third person plural pronoun in Middle English.

Lauren: Oh, how satisfying.

Gretchen: Right. Before we had “he,” “she,” “it,” “they,” we had /he/, /heo/, /hɪt/, and /hie/. These sound extremely similar to each other. There was differentiation that happened. We acquired the form “she.” Then we also acquired the “they” and the “them” instead of /hie/ and /hem/ from Norse.

Lauren: But kept our habit of using the old weak form.

Gretchen: But kept the old weak form the same with that dropped H. It’s just sort of crept along. It’s crept along in such an oral way. Because you’re not getting that from writing. You’re getting it from other people speaking in a chain.

Lauren: This is true. Although, I do find it even more satisfying now that the Pokémon trainer Ash has the surname Ketchum “Catch ‘em.” Bits of his name are in Old English.

Gretchen: There’s some Old English stuff that’s just getting re-spelled by modern speakers to refer to something.

Lauren: How delightful.

Gretchen: This is actually something that I think is a really interesting area for development in English because we have this unstressed form in the “they” paradigm, which it’s a relative newcomer in English even though it’s centuries old. But other neo-pronouns in English like “xe/xem,” you’ve got to think like, okay, they’re gonna need unstressed forms as well. They’re gonna need weak forms like /zə//zəm/ as well so that they can be used in all of the same contexts. Maybe people are already, probably, doing this subconsciously.

Lauren: Sounds like a fascinating research paper. I think I should point out even single, tiny digression we’ve been on and every single example CGEL gives has been agonised over and thought about. The space that it fits in between words and affixes has been pondered over long and hard. As we said, it is very dependent on the specific features of the language that you’re working with to decide if something is an affix or a clitic. I thought I’d give an example from the languages that I work with when I had to decide, writing the grammar of Yolmo, if I was gonna treat some things as affixes or some things as clitics.

Gretchen: Please tell me how you made that decision.

Lauren: Because the criteria are language-specific, like English, I was looking at things that weren’t quite as attached to individual words as affixes. There are affixes in Yolmo. There’s one if you want to say that you’re counting a number of people, you put an affix on the numeral that indicates specifically that that numeral is related to two people or five people. That can only ever go on a numeral. Then you have these affixes like the plural. You might have “the dogs,” or you might have “the dog of my friends.” Even though in English that sounds like a possessive, that’s where you could put the plural in these languages.

Gretchen: Oh, so “the dog of my friends” is actually, like, several dogs belonging to my friend?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Which is sort of like “Helen of Troy’s party” or something like that. That S is actually possessed by “Helen” not possessed by “Troy.”

Lauren: Yeah. It’s a bit more free-floating than the affix that has to go on a number. So, you go, “Well, maybe it’s a word,” but it can’t be a word either because words have tone in Yolmo and many Tibetan languages. These plural markers don’t have tone. You go, “Well, it’s not an affix because it’s more free floating. And it’s not a word, so it doesn’t have tone. It’s a clitic!”

Gretchen: Yay! We have this third category.

Lauren: Thank goodness I have more than two coloured pens because for this part of this grammar using the term “clitic” became incredibly helpful.

Gretchen: That’s such a good example of how the diagnostic criteria is really language specific because you’re like, “Okay, well, it doesn’t have tone, so it can’t be a word.” I assume that there’s an entire chain of logic for why all words have tone. But in English, this is like, okay, this is not the diagnostic criteria you’re gonna use.

Lauren: Absolutely. Some of the criteria in English around weak forms or reduced pronunciation doesn’t work in these languages. Coming at it from a language-specific perspective is really helpful.

Gretchen: Sometimes, also, coming at it from a language-specific perspective will be influenced by the history of the writing system for that language and how the language was written down because, you know, if people are used to writing something as the full form, even though the speech sometimes for quite a long time has been reducing it more and more, there’ll still be this tendency sometimes to be like, okay, we’re gonna write out the full form. That’s why it feels so recoverable. Or we’re going to – okay, yeah, but no one actually says it that way, but there’s still all this written stuff that can influence what people are thinking about.

Lauren: I sometimes wonder if English “a” and “the” would be more likely to be treated as clitics if they were physically attached to the words they were in front of.

Gretchen: Yeah, if they were written there with a little apostrophe or something. When I was looking at this, I was surprised to find that some people think that “n’t,” (like “isn’t,” “can’t,”) isn’t actually a clitic in English. It’s just an affix – it’s on the whole word. Because I was like, “But this is so clearly related to ‘not’” – but also it affects the vowels of the thing it’s attached to. You have stuff like “won’t,” which isn’t really transparently “willn’t.” Maybe these are some reasons to say, “Actually, this is an affix now. It just happens to resemble the negative thing.”

Lauren: I do wonder if English cycles of things becoming attached and becoming more like an affix have been arrested a little bit because of that tradition of writing.

Gretchen: There’s this really fun one that I’ve noticed in English that really trips up people who speak languages with fewer vowels than English. This is the “can/can’t” distinction. In English, in unstressed words, if you have a T or D after an N, it often gets deleted. This is why you see “fish ‘n chips” with that N there. It happens all over the place. It happens constantly – place names, people say Toronto (toronno) /təɹɑnoʊ/ without the second T because it’s something you say a lot. This is super common in English – super normal. It happens in all of these negative words. Like, “don’t” becomes /dən/, which is fine because it’s not contrasting with another /dən/.

Lauren: But if you remove the /t/ in “can’t,” you get “can,” which is confusing.

Gretchen: Which is the positive form. But no, it’s not actually confusing in practice for speakers of English who have all of the vowels that English is used to, because there’s also a reduced form of “can,” which is /kən/. Most English speakers most of the time actually make the distinction between /kən/ and /kæn/ where /kən/ is positive and /kæn/ is negative. It’s just got a full vowel.

Lauren: It’s absolutely one of those things that I will have to go find examples in my own speech before I believe that I do this, but I am open to being shown.

Gretchen: I have witnessed this in conversations where you have one native English speaker and one second language English speaker. The native English speaker will be like, “No, no, no, I /kæn/ do it.” And the non-native English speaker will be like, “You’re saying you can, but it seems from the context like you can’t.” They’ll be hyper-articulating the /kæn/ with even more emphasis on the vowel and still not putting the T in that would actually let you figure out what was going on because the T is just so far gone. There’s a fun example in the musical Hamilton where there’s a line about the young Alexander Hamilton who’s poor and has no money and is working at his first job. The line is “Trading sugarcane and rum and all the things he /kæn/ afford.” The way that the performer gives the real stress on /kæn/, like, it’s not even a reduced form anymore because he’s putting this real stress on it, but there’s no T. It’s extremely clear from context that he can’t afford them. It’s very distinctly articulated. There is no T there anywhere.

Lauren: But as long as we have this writing system, people are gonna hallucinate that T.

Gretchen: If we were sensible, we could just spell them with different vowel symbols and actually just do the thing that we think we’re doing, but we’re not gonna do that.

Lauren: I feel pretty safe to say.

Gretchen: Another place where you see this real, real effect of orthography is in French. I came across, a number of years ago, a Reddit post that, alas, I cannot find anymore where somebody had posted, “Hey, guys, I have this new conlang. It’s got subject prefixes. It’s got object prefixes. You could put negation as a prefix. You can do all this stuff as a thing.” It was like, “Here’s this conlang that’s got these very long words that have all these different prefixes and so on stacked on them. What do you think of my new conlang?” If you read it out loud, it was actually French written phonetically.

Lauren: [Laughs] What a sneaky joke.

Gretchen: It’s really interesting. I know it was a joke, and I think that there are still arguments why French is not a massively agglutinative language with all these subject prefixes and so on. But ever since that joke post, I have never been entirely certain anymore.

Lauren: Again, you need something that’s the equivalent of CGEL for French to do the hard work of picking it apart.

Gretchen: Not just CGEL for French, but it would have to be CGEL for spoken French. Because written French comes from this tradition where it’s not, but modern day spoken French is quite divergent from written French. There’s even more of an aspect in learning how to read where you learn a bunch of stuff that used to be true, and then you have to unlearn that to talk to people. A really interesting example is there’re a lot of languages where you change the form of the verb, and then you can tell what the subject is. This is still true in a bunch of other Romance languages. Spanish and Italian, you change the verb, and you can tell if it’s me or if it’s you. In French, you do change this in the writing, but what you actually do is you have to have the pronoun. So, if you have something like, “Je prends les crêpes. Tu prends l'omelette,” which is what you might say at a restaurant – “I’ll take the crepes. You can have the omelette.”

Lauren: Thanks for ordering for me. I hate making choices. [Laughter]

Gretchen: You have the “je” and the “tu” that’s telling the different there. But these are, in French, clitic pronouns. They’re definitely at least clitics because you really have to put them, and you have to put them leaning on the verb. You can’t say them in isolation.

Lauren: That’s a really good diagnostic criterion.

Gretchen: You could, in English, say, “Who ordered the crepes?” You could say, “Me.” You could say, “It is I,” if you wanna sound kind of formal. Both of these are sort of okay. In French, you cannot say, “je.” Like, “Who ordered the crepes?” “Je.” No. No, no, no, no, no, no. You need to use this whole other form of the pronoun, which is the only one that can happen by itself, which is “moi.” Then, if you wanna be emphatic about it, you can say, “Moi je prends les crêpes,” which is often translated sort of like, “Me, I’ll have the crepes.” But it actually shows up in the same context as in a language like Spanish or Italian where you would actually just put in the normal subject pronoun because you don’t normally need it because the verb at the end tells you.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: I really kind of wanna make the case that this is actually – it’s not even a clitic anymore. It’s actually fully glommed onto the verb. But, you know, the Académie Française is gonna completely disagree with me.

Lauren: It is a good demonstration that something – and a lot of the examples we’ve discussed in this episode start as words and then, in English, we’ve seen those weak forms of words, allow them to become clitics. With the literal etymology of “enclitic” in Latin being “to lean” – so begin to lean on words. They’re not fully attached. They’re just leaning on them. Which I get a very cosy visual image with that etymology. Then, once they’ve been leaning on words for long enough, they become dependent and really attach to them as affixes. This process of going from being an independent word, especially in these functional categories, through to being a fully-attached part of the grammar is something that happens repeatedly within a single language across time and across all of our spoken and signed human languages – this process of grammaticalising through from being words to affixes and occasionally stopping off as clitics in between.

Gretchen: Sometimes a clitic is this pathway. If you think of “n’t” in English where it’s like, okay, maybe that’s a clitic, but maybe there’s actually good reasons to say that it’s part of the whole word by now. Sometimes, something can stay clitic-y, like maybe that apostrophe S in English. There’s all sorts of stuff along the way. I mean, you could also see, in Romance languages, it’s so well-established and has long been talked about historically that the pronouns are clitics that maybe some of them are actually not becoming clitics. Like in French or in Spanish, you can do both the pronoun and the full noun in some contexts, like “Le di un regalo a mi madre,” which is literally like, “To her, I gave a gift to my mother.” In English, you can’t do this.

Lauren: Really doubling down there.

Gretchen: You’re doing both. In Spanish you can. You can make the argument that maybe this is the beginning of just marking the object on the verb, which lots of languages do. Then they do have you put the full noun as well. This is a pathway to making it more grammatical than the same thing in English where they’re competing for the same position.

Lauren: It just happens so frequently in this direction and, incredibly rarely, in the other direction that something will break free from a word. We’ve talked about “ish” as a – something’s grammatical-ish. It can break away and become its own thing, ish, now. But the reason we keep bringing up that one example is because it’s so unusual and that the tide just flows in the other direction overwhelmingly.

Gretchen: The normal thing is for stuff to get smaller and shorter, especially when it’s said a lot, and then gradually start merging with the words around it. It’s such an interesting experience to me thinking of yourself in the middle of a language’s history rather than at some sort of end point, like everything that was going on was building up to this, and to say, no, the stuff that we do now that’s slang-y or casual or seems like it’s just reduced effort is gonna be like, oh, yeah, no, here’s this really grammatical thing that happens in another dozen generations.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get kiki bouba scarves, “What the fricative” t-shirts, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to 54 bonus Episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards, as well as helping keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include backchannelling, speaking under the influence, and an interview with Emily Gref from Planet Word. Remember, you can get a special pack of four Lingthusiasm stickers by becoming a Ling-phabet patron before November 3rd, 2021. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Managing Producer is Liz McCullough, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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thenotetoselfpod-hq · 3 years

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“The answer is yes if you were wondering if y’all were spoiled. Whew, Chile. Don’t ask me for NOTHIN’ else.” Zion chuckled sweetly as she dramatically cleared her throat. “Lets get into it. Welcome back to another episode of the Note to Self podcast where we talk all things self care of the body, spirit, mind, work ethic, sprinkled in with a whole lot of motivation to carry us into a new day. I am your host Zion Taylor and with me in my makeshift studio is my lil baby who listens to all of my problems, my boss friend THEEEEE Brilliant O’neal.” Zion air claps as she smiles over at Brilliant. “How are you on this lovely day, mama?”

“Hey, hey, hey! I’m so excited to speak to the note to self listeners all over, it’s been fun listening in and making my own input here and there but wheww being here feels so rewarding.” She said warmly before playfully exhaling. “I’m doing good, managing like I usually do but good nonetheless. How are you?! What jewels do you plan on dropping for the people today?”

“I’m probably doin’ a little less good than you since you’re managing but girl .. I cannot complain at all. So thankful to have you here for this episode and to just catch up. We’ll get into the tea of it all a little later. We start every episode with a brief recap and I wanted to thank everyone, again, for all of the love. I hope you all were inspired to really keep killing shit in the industry that you’re in and watch the doors open up for you. Last weeks top listeners were the beauty that is known as @royalnike who spoke about her Black Owned Mechanic business and the short term goals that she has for herself in that business. Of course you, Mrs. Brilli Dis, founder and owner of The Glamour Parlor, and the beautiful @syxrai, who I’m obsessed with on IG by the way, but who also is a film producer ALL shared your short term goals which inspired me tremendously. If you missed out on that go give it a listen and drop your own goals in the comment section.

Music is the only thing that gets me through my week sometimes. This week is on you because Channing is still pressed about Good Days so that shit rings in my head every day because of her.” Zion laughed, “What have you been listening to this week? Any new music you wanna share? Put us on.

Brilliant cracked up in laughter at the mention of Channing. “That baby got taste, because that’s my jam! But this week I’ve been on my Gangsta Brilli, I’ve been playing A Gangsta’s Pain by MoneyBagg on repeat. I think his track with Jhené is the perfect vibe, so if y’all need something to vibe to, with a nice little glass of wine, One of Dem Nights, but the whole album bops.”

“Okaaaay. Now see I haven’t always been a MoneyBaggYo fan up until his songs started getting airtime on the radio. I’ma definitely have to give that a listen once Channing is done boppin’ to her fave.

And that brings us right into the TEA for the day. I’ve known Brilliant for several years now and I feel like I’ve only known her as this amazing business women, wife and mother. We both know how crazy it can be going from Hashtag Living Single to Mommy Duties real quick once you’re married and have wifely duties, etc. How long did you know your Husband before you two decided to make it official AND tie the knot? Was marrying young something that you were open to or did it not matter? What’s that young love story you can’t wait to share with your kids?” Zion smiled as she looked over at Brilliant.

“So I always tell people that me and my husband’s love story is literally crazy, and I don’t think it could’ve happened any other way. Because were short on time, for the real how we met tea, watch our YouTube video! But..I think we dated for about a year before I got pregnant and just because of the type of man he is and how in love we were, and how happy we were when our son Justice was born, we got married when he was about 3 months. I honestly didn’t see myself marrying that young or having children..and my life did a whole 180. I just thought damn I’ll probably hate it here but when you have that person to make those defining moments with..it was a breeze and I found myself being happier with my little family than when I ran the streets. I don’t think marrying young is for everyone but when you make the right decision..man the moments you’ll create..priceless. Still a hot girl though, don’t get that twisted.” She said with a playful laugh.

“EXACTLYYY. I have to remind Lex all the time when he sees me playing dress up in my boots and coochie cutters that mama BEEN a stallion, okay?! Hot Girl Summer me, please!” She laughed, “No but seriously the feeeeels. I’m obsessed with the love you two have for each other. It’s infectious. But I’m sure it hasn’t always been cupcakes and rainbows, right. Y’all, shit gets real after the wedding and the vows and even after that honeymoon phase. I know for me and Carmelo, I’m more of the opinionated one and I really had to learn to step down and let my man LEAD our home. We were pregnant before the wedding ... liiike ya girl had her dress taken OUT 4 times before I was satisfied with how my hips looked in it.” She chuckled, “You said something so special, when you have that person to make memories with you will DEFINITELY not want to live a single day without them and expanding that love into children only makes it better. Melo was trying to get me pregnant BEFORE he proposed to me and I wasn’t having it because at the time I was dealing with fertility issues and having a baby seemed damn near impossible. I always say that he spoke the life of our son, Lexington, into existence because I didn’t think that I could physically carry.” She stated, smiling again at the thought.

“I remember you alls last video where you announced the pregnancy of my other child, Jewel” She chuckled, “Um, what was the experience like for you? Having to go through all that you did for the blessing that is currently your literal shadow. She looks like her Daddy but has your everything else. What was that like?”

“That’s your child for sure.” She said with a laugh. “It was actually on the difficult side, she’s my rainbow baby. I suffered a miscarriage and some issues with fertility so I actually got pregnant with Jewel through IVF. I adore her, it’s scary having a mini version of myself. Someone who’s with all my hair, makeup and nail antics because my son Justice is not with it at all! He won’t even let me take his picture half the time.” She laughed momentarily. “I know it’s the same way with you and my baby Channing”

“I can imagine it being extremely difficult. When God’s mind is made up we can only pray that He’s included us in His plans and when he made Channing? He definitely had me in mind.” She laughed. “I still don’t know how we got so lucky but I don’t question anything. She’s obsessed with all of my clothes and hair and everything in between.”

“The last thing I wanted to talk to you about is what’s been going on in the media with Porsha, Falynn, and the Husband who I don’t even know his name yet. So Porsha Williams brought onto the Real Housewives of Atlanta show her friend Falynn a few years ago. Maybe like two seasons ago. This is someone who was also featured on this last season of the RHOA show that was filmed in 2020. Apparently the two are no longer friends and Porsha is now ENGAGED to Falynns’ Husband because they haven’t even gotten a divorce yet. I wan’t to know your thoughts on the whole situation. What type of friendship dynamic do you think they had for Porsha to be comfortable MARRYING this man?”

“Engaged. To. A. Former. Friend’s. Husband.” She said slowly before letting out a low sigh. “Now, the first mistake she made was being engaged or dating a man who is still married. I don’t care what the circumstances are, he is legally married! It is literally code and decency not to date or marry after your friends. If y’all are friends or have ever called each other friends, that’s just unacceptable. I would beat the breaks off anyone I called a friend for going after my husband if we ever were to divorce. That’s just grimy and I don’t think Falynn is mad enough. I do know though, one of my followers who is a hair stylist said how she married one of her old client’s ex husband and child’s father. Do you think that’s acceptable? Say I did a woman’s hair for years and nothing besides that and I went on to date her ex?”

“Absolutely not. Unacceptable and I’m the type of crazy that belongs in jail so you already know how that’s gone gooo. It’ll forever be up until they give me life.” Zion laughed and shook her head, “Period. Porsha is most definitey a fucked up individual but I would LOVE to hear y’alls thoughts on the matter so leave alll comments in the comment section below.”

“Thank you all so much for listening to me and Brilliant catch up. Brilliant please tell my listeners where they can follow you and how they can support The Glamour Parlour. Alsooo, when’s the next brunch or giveaway?”

“It has been sooo fun talking with you! I’m glad I got the opportunity to talk with to boss friend Zion! I get this question a lot..so often.” She let out a low laugh. “All I’ll say is to stay tuned, we’ll be turning up soon and the giveaways won’t stop!”

“Ayyyy so there it is people, the beautiful Brilliant O’neal. Be sure to check her out across all social media platforms at @brillixdis and I’ll talk to you in the next episode. Byyyyyyyye.”

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onceinabluehanguangjun · 3 years

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ao3

“I need you to do me a favor.”

“Isn’t my entire life just a series of me doing you favors?”

Wei Ying grinned wildly as Wen Qing glared a hole into his face, as per usual. Neither of them broke until her little brother, Wen Ning, quietly laughed at them with his eyes on the cup of tea in his hand. Wen Qing softened almost immediately and Wei Ying stuck his tongue out.

“What do you need, Qingqing?”

Wen Qing rolled her eyes, but she sat up a little straighter to sell whatever favor she needed from him.

“You know how my school does little carnival-esque fundraisers where everyone sets up a booth and shit?” she asked. Wei Ying nodded.

“Because they’re stupid rich and somehow wanna suck even more money from their students, including the ones who are there on scholarship, yes, I know how it does that.”

“Exactly,” Wen Qing agreed, taking a deep breath, “My group‒just me and a couple of other scholarship students‒decided to do a kissing booth because they’ve done well in the past years and I’m not trying to get on the dean’s bad side.”

“Oooh, a kissing booth? How shameless! Do you need me to do your makeup so you get more willing participants?” Wei Ying teased. Wen Qing stared at him blankly until he laughed and gestured for her to continue.

“I need your help finding someone to, like, be the face and do all the kissing. Someone rich people will want to pay to kiss. I need a guy, Mianmian’s already agreed to take one for the team,” Wen Qing said. Wei Ying’s smile slowly found his face.

“Alright, alright, I’ll do it.”

“That’s not at all where I was‒”

“I understand, I’m irresistible! And I’m a great kisser, so they’ll probably even come back for seconds,” Wei Ying insisted, sitting back. Wen Ning was back to suppressing his laughter.

“You don’t shut up long enough for anyone to kiss you,” Wen Qing said, “I was hoping for you to ask Lan Zhan, maybe.” Wei Ying scoffed.

“Lan Zhan?” Wei Ying repeated. He thought of his rigid next-door neighbor that he all but forced to be his best friend. He went to her ridiculous school and was one of the rich ones. Not that he wasn’t smart enough to get there on scholarship, but he had the money. Still, the idea of him at a kissing booth was laughable. “Lan Zhan would be terrible at that!”

“Why? He’s conventionally attractive, that’s what we need,” Wen Qing insisted.

“First of all, conventionally attractive sounds like an insult to him,” Wei Ying said, ignoring the way she took a deep breath of annoyance, “Second of all, he’s the most uptight person ever! I don’t think he kisses people. Or ever plans to. I can’t imagine him kissing anyone without being extremely uncomfortable and deciding never to do it again.”

“You can’t imagine him kissing anyone?” Wen Qing asked slowly, raising a dubious eyebrow. Wei Ying shook his head.

“No! He doesn’t even like being touched, why would want to kiss anyone? Silly suggestion. I’ll do great! Much better than he would,” Wei Ying said firmly. Wen Qing shook her head.

“I know you, you won’t like doing that.”

“What do you mean? I’m going to love it! Kissing rich randoms all day sounds awesome. Besides, maybe one of them can fall in love with me and I’ll have a sugar daddy. Or mommy. I’m not picky at this point,” Wei Ying insisted. Wen Qing closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Come on! Let me do it!”

“If you agree to this, you realize you can’t go back on it? You have to actually commit, you can’t chicken out,” Wen Qing insisted. Wei Ying gasped playfully, putting his hand over his heart.

“How dare you insinuate I’m not reliable! Ning-di, tell your sister I’m the most reliable person she’s ever met,” Wei Ying said. Wen Ning looked up with wide, doe eyes when he realized he was being dragged into the conversation. He looked between the two of them.

“Ying-ge did help me finish my project last week,” he said, “And every other project. And made sure it didn’t break on the way to school.”

“See! Reliable!”

“Helping my brother with homework is one thing, you kissing a bunch of people without panicking is another thing,” she said.

“Why would I panic?” Wei Ying scoffed.

Sure, he was almost 18 and hadn’t had his first kiss yet, but that was normal. Besides, what better way to get your first kiss over with than in the least sexy and most clinical way possible? It’d be like a practice round and when he had his first real kiss, then he’d be even better at it than he knew he already would be.

Still, Wen Qing fixed him with a look.

“Alright, fine. But when you freak out, you’re still gonna go through with it. See you next week.”

Wei Ying snorted as she stood up and he leaned towards Wen Ning.

“She loves me.”

“Yeah,” Wen Ning agreed. Wei Ying’s smile was a lot more genuine as he sat back in his chair, his cheeks tinted a bit red at the casualness of it. He was younger than him by a few years, barely 15 and ridiculously shy. But he wasn’t shy about how much he enjoyed Wei Ying’s friendship and that always threw him for a loop. “Bye, Ying-ge.”

“Bye! Text me if you need homework help,” he said, sending them off with a wave.

Wei Ying was left alone for just long enough to get a bit antsy with not much to do other than stare at his phone. However, Lan Zhan came to the rescue, as per usual, and filled the empty seat.

“Lan Zhan! How was orchestra practice?” Wei Ying asked, leaning forward. Lan Zhan, with his perfect posture and his cute little uniform and his adorable little curtain bangs, sat his bag in the chair beside him and carefully took a sip of the tea he’d ordered.

“Fine,” he said simply. Wei Ying nodded.

“That’s good. You just missed Wen Ning and Wen Qing, they were here. Oh, she mentioned that fundraiser. What booth are you doing?” he pressed. Lan Zhan looked at him through his eyelashes over the cup, momentarily making eye contact. Warmth bloomed in Wei Ying’s chest. He always felt special when Lan Zhan made eye contact with him. It reminded him that they really were friends and Lan Zhan didn’t hate him.

“No booth,” he answered, “Uncle agreed to simply donate the required amount so I wouldn’t have to attend.”

“Of course, of course,” Wei Ying said. He knew Lan Zhan wasn’t really a fan of crowds, so that made sense. “But, ah, well, I’ll be there, so maybe you’ll come by anyway?”

“You’ll be there?” Lan Zhan asked, slowly putting his cup down. Wei Ying smiled and nodded, leaning forward even more.

“Yeah, Wen Qing needed a guy to do the kissing booth,” Wei Ying said. Lan Zhan blinked a few times and his eyebrows raised.

“A kissing booth?”

“Yes!”

“And you will be… doing the kissing?” he asked. He had a similarly skeptical tone in his voice to Wen Qing and Wei Ying couldn’t help but make a hurt noise.

“Why does everyone think so little of me? I can kiss strangers with no problem!”

“Mn.”

“Lan Zhan!”

Lan Zhan kept his eyes on the table as he took another sip of tea. Wei Ying was really interested to know what about it made it seem so impossible that he would be willing to kiss strangers. Did he really seem that innocent and inexperienced? He clearly needed to work on the vibe he was giving off.

“It seems,” Lan Zhan said, pausing for a long moment as his grip tightened on his cup, “Unsanitary.”

“Ah, I’ll buy a whole bottle of mouthwash for the day, how’s that?” he says.

“Mn.”

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying called, leaning even further to the point his head was almost on the table and his arms were stretched out. Lan Zhan wasn’t smiling, but it was very close. His features had gone all soft and Wei Ying highly considered pinching his cheek. “You and Wen Qing are so mean to me. Can’t I have enough confidence to kiss half the girls in your school for money?”

Lan Zhan blinked slowly in that way that drove Wei Ying just a bit insane. He moved and spoke so slow sometimes. Wei Ying was convinced if he was anyone else, Lan Zhan would never be able to hold his attention. He even had to listen to podcasts on 1.5x speed just so he wouldn’t lose interest.

“Mn,” Lan Zhan said.

Wei Ying slumped in his chair and groaned.

“I’m going to prove it to you and Wen Qing that I’m entirely capable of pulling this off.”

“Alright.”

Wei Ying glared at him, but it didn’t last long. It was hard to glare at him for long. Instead, he sighed dramatically and took out his earbuds, the wire hanging as he held one of them out to Lan Zhan. He accepted it and slowly put it in his ear as Wei Ying put the other in his. They had to lean a bit into the counter to share, but they’d been doing this nearly every day for as long as Wei Ying could remember.

“This episode’s on King Leopold II.”

“Mn.”

Wei Ying was fine.

Every day leading up to the kissing booth, he’d been fine. Wen Qing had texted him and reminded him that he couldn’t back out and he would say, ‘why would I want to?!’ and he was serious. This would be fine.

But now that he was set to be there in two hours, he was starting to lose his nerve.

“Jiejie, do I look alright?” Wei Ying asked for what was probably the billionth time. Jiang Yanli looked up from her laptop and gave him a very thoughtful look so he wouldn’t call her out for just saying he looked good without thought.

“You look very handsome.”

“Handsome? I don’t need to look handsome, I need to look hot.”

“A-Ying, I think you’re going to have a line of people wanting to kiss you,” she insisted. Wei Ying sighed, dragging his body over to her. He fell to her bed dramatically and let himself indulge in the sound of her amused laughter as he dropped his head to her shoulder. “What’s wrong, A-Ying?”

He sighed, “Have you ever kissed anyone, Jiejie?”

“Yes,” she answered easily. He tried not to let the instinctive face of disgust take over.

“Do you think any of the girls will know I’ve never kissed anyone?”

“Well, probably not because it’ll be short kisses, won’t they? They’ll be none the wiser,” she said. Wei Ying still managed a pout.

“Will you beat them up if they laugh at me?”

“Of course I will,” Jiang Yanli laughed softly, her hand reaching up to tuck his hair behind his ear. Wei Ying nodded and tried to calm his mind down with her presence.

He was sad to see that it only helped a little bit.

“I’m gonna go change into something hotter,” he said. Jiang Yanli laughed and nodded.

“Alright. Don’t leave without a goodbye.”

“I won’t.”

Wei Ying made his way into his room and looked at himself in the mirror hanging on his closet. He’d left his hair down because he thought maybe he looked edgy, but he was beginning to think it was just a recipe for disaster. If he left it down, he’d just mess with it the entire time. He raked it into a messy ponytail and pulled a bit down to frame his face. His nails scraped over the shaved sides and wondered if those should be touched up too.

Instead of thinking too much about that, Wei Ying quickly changed his shirt again. This time he tried a black button-up which he stopped buttoning when the top four were undone. He stared at himself and buttoned another one and then stared at himself and then unbuttoned it.

“Why do I care so much? I’m never going to see these girls again. This is totally useless, this is just for practice,” he grumbled to himself, though he could already feel his face getting warmer and warmer by the minute. It was all fine when it was just a thing he agreed to. Now that he actually had to do it, well…

“Wei Ying?”

Wei Ying nearly jumped out of his skin as he heard his name, spinning around with his hand over his heart. Lan Zhan stood there in the doorway, hands neatly behind his back. There were many times in life where Wei Ying was happy to see him, but this was easily one of his favorites. He needed a distraction and Lan Zhan was good at that.

“Warn a man next time, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying said, though he was thankful for being startled. For a moment, his head emptied.

“Mn,” Lan Zhan said, taking a step inside his bedroom.

“What are you doing here? Not that I don’t like seeing your face, but I figured you’d be spending the evening curled up with a good book or, or a movie. Or a new K-Drama, maybe. Something other than thinking about the lame fundraiser. Super lame, you know,” Wei Ying rambled.

Lan Zhan nodded and his hand reached out the grab the edge of the door. Wei Ying’s eyes followed it as he closed it, leaving the two of them in the room alone. He could count on one hand how many times they’d been in a closed space completely alone. Somehow it made his throat feel dry. Though, that might be him freaking out about the kissing booth still.

“Wen Qing asked me to check on you,” Lan Zhan said, “To make sure you were alright.”

“I’m fine,” Wei Ying said, standing up straighter, “She needs to learn to stop babying me. I’m a grown man.”

“Mn,” Lan Zhan hummed, his hands returning to the space behind his back as he took a step closer, “So I should tell her you aren’t worried.”

“I’m not! I’m fine!” Wei Ying said and if his voice was a bit higher than normal, so what.

Lan Zhan took a step back.

“Mn. I was going to help you relax, but if you’re relaxed, then I’ll go,” he said. It was bait and Wei Ying knew it was bait, but he couldn’t help himself but call out.

“Wait,” he said, pulling at the hem of his shirt, “What were you gonna do? Like, in case I was nervous.”

Wei Ying would never say it, but there was something about Lan Zhan that made his mind a bit easier. He seemed to quiet some of the noise just by being there. Yes, he spoke slow and moved slow, but that forced Wei Ying’s brain to do the same.

Lan Zhan took a step forward again.

“I was going to say that kissing isn’t that complicated,” he said. Wei Ying rolled his eyes.

“How would you know?” Lan Zhan’s eyebrow raised and Wei Ying’s stomach plummeted as it came to his attention that perhaps he’d been wrong about that. Lan Zhan took another step closer to him. Wei Ying swallowed. “I have a confession to make, Lan Zhan.”

“Mn.”

“I’ve never kissed anyone,” he said. Saying it out loud just made him feel even more nervous. “And now I feel stupid and like I’m going to embarass myself. All those girls have probably kissed a ton of guys and they’d be paying money just for me to let them down and then I’ll let Wen Qing down because they’ll tell their friends that it wasn’t that good. Then I’m going to have to come up with a way to pay for her share of the donation because it’ll be‒”

“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan said, voice low and smooth and distracting.

“What?”

“Wei Ying,” he repeated, taking another step closer.

Wei Ying’s eyes shifted between his close proximity and the closed door. Lan Zhan’s hand moved from behind his back to reach up and gently place on Wei Ying’s jaw. His mind started spinning with a whole new wave of thoughts.

“Oh,” Wei Ying said seconds before Lan Zhan closed the space between them.

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to happen‒mainly because what the fuck‒but Wei Ying found himself shocked when it lasted longer than a couple seconds like he was sure the kissing booth kisses were going to be. Instead, Lan Zhan tilted his head and parted his lips just a little, just enough to slot perfectly around Wei Ying’s bottom lip to give it a little kiss of its own. He then pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth and then another peck right on his lips before pulling back.

Wei Ying stood there, frozen as he stared at Lan Zhan with wide eyes. He hadn’t realized he wanted to do that.

“Close your eyes, Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan instructed softly.

“Well, wait, are you gonna do that again?” Wei Ying asked. Lan Zhan got that whole soft-faced thing again and nodded, so Wei Ying promptly shut his eyes.

They were the same height so there truly was no reason for Lan Zhan to touch his chin and tilt his head up, but it certainly made things a bit more fun. Lan Zhan kissed him again, parting his lips again much sooner and Wei Ying followed suit. He mimicked the way Lan Zhan moved, hoping that it wasn’t too embarrassing and somehow not giving a shit even if it was. It was good.

And then Lan Zhan pushed his tongue past Wei Ying’s lips.

Wei Ying gasped in response, moving back just a little and Lan Zhan immediately stopped. He opened his eyes and made eye contact with him, up close and personal.

“You, like, actually know what you’re doing, don’t you?” Wei Ying asked.

“Mn.”

“Who have you been kissing, Lan Zhan?” Wei Ying teased, feeling a bit more than giddy. He pushed himself onto his toes and draped his arms around his neck. Lan Zhan had to tilt his head back just a bit to maintain eye contact and Wei Ying was enamored. “Wait, wait, don’t talk, just keep going.”

“Mn.”

Lan Zhan met his lips again, his tongue immediately pressing into his mouth and this time Wei Ying was expecting it. It was a little weird, but it was nothing he couldn’t adjust to. Nothing he wanted to stop. Especially not when Lan Zhan easily held the brunt of his weight the more he pressed into his personal space, causing him to arch his back as he did so.

His hands slid down to Wei Ying’s hips, giving them a small squeeze as he tugged him closer. Wei Ying continued to mimic him‒copying the way his tongue moved, the way his teeth grazed his lips, the way he didn’t mind if it got a little messy and a little gross. It would probably be gross with anyone else.

It was all normal until Wei Ying made a needy little noise that he hadn’t intended. He could feel his face grow warm and he considered pulling back, but Lan Zhan’s hand moved back to his jaw and he kissed him deeper. Then Lan Zhan started backing him up until his legs hit his bed.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying gasped, trying to catch his breath as he broke the kiss. Lan Zhan’s eyes opened again and met him.

“Wei Ying,” he said.

Wei Ying tightened his arms around Lan Zhan’s neck, finding himself quite desperate to keep him in his grasp. Lan Zhan obliged by not even trying to leave as his hand rubbed up and down his side mindlessly. He wanted to stare at him forever.

“Lan Zhan, why’d you do that?” Wei Ying asked after he was back to breathing normally. Or, as normally as he could when he was still this close to Lan Zhan. He was pretty sure Lan Zhan could feel his heart thudding in his chest. “Were you just being polite so I wouldn’t embarrass myself?”

Lan Zhan didn’t say a word, didn’t even hum.

“Was it because you’re just a good friend?” Wei Ying asked. Again, no answer. A pout slowly started to form on Wei Ying’s face. “Lan Zhaaan, give me an answer. I need to know!”

Lan Zhan’s eyes trailed away from him and down to the pout on his lips. And then he moved forward and took his pouting lip between his teeth. Wei Ying made a noise in shock, but he didn’t move away as he felt Lan Zhan’s tongue graze his lip. Then he was being kissed again and all of his questions left his head as Lan Zhan all but pushed him onto his bed.

He didn’t care what his motives were, he just didn’t want it to stop.

Lan Zhan hovered over him, leaving a trail of kisses over his cheek and his jaw and then to his neck. Somehow, that was when Wei Ying’s brain actually shut down. His eyes closed and his lips parted as he tried to keep steady breaths, his body all too attuned to the way Lan Zhan kissed and sucked and bit at his neck. There was no reason that should’ve felt as good as it did. It helped that he had his weight on him. All he could feel was Lan Zhan.

“Lan Zhan,” he said, bowing his head into his shoulder and hoping he didn’t minimize Lan Zhan’s target area. He kept his arms around his shoulders, hugging him tight as he did whatever he was doing to his neck. “Ahh, Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan.”

It was all cut short, though, when Wei Ying’s phone started ringing.

He very much wanted to ignore it, wanted to just continue doing this, but Lan Zhan reached for it and handed it to him. His biting and sucking turned into more patient kitten licks, but it was still distracting as all hell.

“What?” Wei Ying asked as he answered the phone, not bothering to see who was calling. He just hoped it wasn’t either of his adoptive parents.

“I’m going to be at your house in two minutes, so be outside,” Wen Qing said. Wei Ying’s eyes widened as he remembered that not only did he have to stop, but he had to kiss other people after this. How the hell was he supposed to do that?

And maybe he finally understood why Wen Qing had been hesitant.

“Okay, yeah, yeah, I’ll be there. See you soon, Qingqing,” he said.

“You too, Wei Ying,” she said back and for once she sounded a bit fond.

The moment the call was over, Wei Ying groaned and kicked his feet childishlessly. Lan Zhan hummed in what seemed to be amusement against his collarbone.

“Lan Zhan, this has ruined me for everyone else this evening, do you understand? How am I supposed to kiss a line of girls after that?” he asked. Lan Zhan moved to prop himself up on his elbow, looking down at Wei Ying. If he wasn’t still pressed up against him, he probably would’ve thrown a fit.

“Mn,” Lan Zhan hummed, his fingers trailing idly up his body and to his neck where he pressed two fingers into a sore spot. Wei Ying furrowed his eyebrows and reached up to feel as well, still damp from Lan Zhan’s kisses. It took a few seconds to put together why it felt that way and his eyes went wide.

“Ahh,” he said, looking up to Lan Zhan, “Everyone’s gonna be able to see that in a few hours, won’t they?”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Mn,” Lan Zhan agreed, the faintest of smiles on his lips, “I’m not.”

“Lan Zhan, you’re so cheeky, I can’t believe it!” Wei Ying laughed, wriggling a bit as he moved to lay on his side so he could be chest to chest with Lan Zhan, “Ah, but I have to go.”

“You do,” he said. Wei Ying pouted again, only slightly hoping that’d lead to more kisses.

“Maybe if I use mouthwash like I said I would, you’ll kiss me like that later? Or, like, tomorrow‒at the latest, just in case I get sick of kissing after the booth,” Wei Ying said.

“Whenever Wei Ying wants,” Lan Zhan agreed. Wei Ying smirked easily, nudging his knee into Lan Zhan’s.

“Ah, don’t say that, you’ll be stuck with me hanging off you like a leech every day for the rest of your life,” Wei Ying teased.

“Alright,” Lan Zhan agreed. Wei Ying immediately felt his face flush and he bowed his head against Lan Zhan’s chest, shaking his head.

“How am I supposed to think straight if you agree to things like that?!” he whined. Lan Zhan hummed.

“Hopefully you won’t.”

“Was that a joke?” Wei Ying asked, lifting his head and laughing easily. Lan Zhan was smiling at him bigger than he ever had before. “Oh, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, stop it, I have to go and you’re making that impossible.”

“Mn,” Lan Zhan said, leaning forward and pressing a quick kiss to his lips, “Go.”

“And this isn’t the last time we do this, right? Like, I get more Lan Zhan kisses, you promise?” he asked, pushing himself up beginning to crawl over Lan Zhan’s body. He paused to hover over him and make eye contact to make sure this wasn’t just a very intense fever dream.

“Mn.”

“Okay then. I’ll go,” Wei Ying said, climbing off him slowly and taking a few wobbly steps backward. The further away he got, the more he got to take in the picturesque image of Lan Zhan laying in his bed. “And I’ll be back and I’m going to kiss you again.”

“Goodbye, Wei Ying.”

“Bye, Lan Zhan.”

Wei Ying somehow made it out of the front door in one piece, his heart still thudding as he thought about what just happened. He still wasn’t quite sure what it meant between them, but he did know it meant he probably wouldn’t have to worry about kissing too many strangers after this.

When Wen Qing pulled up in her old, beat-up car and he climbed into the passenger side, she gave him a once over.

“Wow,” she said, “You actually don’t look like you’re nervous. Guess Lan Zhan was actually helpful.”

“Yeah,” Wei Ying laughed, touching his bottom lip, “Super helpful.”

#wangxian #wangxian fic #wei wuxian #lan wangji #mdzs #the untamed #my fic

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magnusmysteries · 3 years

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Part 24: Cobwebs Everywhere

The Magnus Archives was a horror podcast. It is now completed. Many of the show’s mysteries were never explained on the show. I intend to explain them. Spoilers for the show, but also spoilers if you wanna solve these mysteries yourself.

Arthur Noland is influenced by the web (see part 21). Arthur is guarding the nest that transforms Jane Prentiss. Arthur thinks he is guarding it so he can destroy it properly later. The Web makes him think that, actually he is just protecting the nest until Jane gets turned. Jane getting turned is of course part of the Web’s plan.

Jane is also influenced by the Web, she mentions their song in her statement. The Web makes Jane put her hand into the nest.

Martin and Jane meet in the apartment building of Carlos Vittery. Too good to be a coincidence, the Web influenced them both to go there.

The Web manipulates John to try to kill a spider. This allows him to discover the mass of worms in the Archive, which leads to the Prentiss attack. The Web did not want the attack to happen later, because then Prentiss might have built up enough worms to succeed in killing John.

In The Coming Storm Basira rescues John right before Daisy is about to kill him, but right after Daisy gives him a scar. We’re talking perfect timing, down to a few seconds. Too precise to be luck, the Web must have influenced Basira to show up at the right moment. In the same episode Daisy implies she and Basira were manipulated into giving the tapes from police evidence to John.

It was Annabelle’s plan that after the apocalypse, Elias would be killed and the panopticon destroyed at the same time. For this, two people were needed. Georgie is the one that takes the web lighter used to explode the panopticon. I think the talking corpse from Dead Woman Walking was influenced by the Web. The Web wanted her to create a person that could feel no fear, and therefore could travel freely after the apocalypse. That person was planned to be the one to explode the panopticon. Probably random that it turned out to be Georgie, she’s the one that covered her ears. This early on the Web probably didn’t know Martin, Basira and Melanie would also be around after the apocalypse.

When John is on the run from the police he hides at Georgie’s place. They talk about it being weird he happens to hide with a person that is also involved with the supernatural. But the Web needs John and Georgie to know each other, since they are to cooperate after the apocalypse. The Web made them know each other in the first place, and influenced John to go to her to hide.

In A Guest for Mr. Spider John says “My parents had passed away when I was too young to really remember them; my father of an accidental fall when I was two, and my mother a couple of years later from complications during routine surgery.”

A fall is an unusual cause of death. And we have one fear that specializes in falling. I think his father was killed by the Vast. And if his father was killed by a fear, then probably his mother also. So the Corruption. If they were not killed by fears, there is no narrative reason to mention how they died.

But why kill his parents? Well, it makes John live with his grandmother. Which is the one that gave him the book. John thinks his grandmother got it from a second-hand bookstore, but he only has her word for that. I think his grandmother works for the Web. I think the Web manipulated some avatars of other powers into killing John’s parents.

Elias thinks John was sent to the institute already marked by the Web, to help him with his ritual. So John was probably chosen already from childhood. And it would be very useful for the Web if the chosen one was raised by a Web avatar. She could influence him to get to know Georgie, and to get a job at the Institute.

I think Melanie’s therapist Laverne was working for the Web. First because we hear the tape from her recorder which suggests it’s a Web recorder. Secondly the first person Melanie and Georgie rescue after the apocalypse just happens to be Melanie's therapist. Too big of a coincidence, part of the web’s plan.

Part 2 is about how the fears use warning and give people choices. I think the recorder is a warning here, since Melanie already knows supernatural recorders exist. When Melanie does not give permission to be recorded, she makes the right choice. I think therefore Laverne can’t mind control Melanie, but she can still manipulate her non-supernaturally.

Melanie said she would not do any more work while at the Institute. She had come to this decision via therapy. Maybe the therapist wanted Melanie not to help John, to make it more likely John gets the fear scars.

The people that Melanie and Georgie rescued started worshipping them. I think Laverne was responsible for that. I think the plan was for Georgie and Melanie to be caught up in the cult’s belief. To start to believe that they really were the holy saviors of the world. And that would make them go along with Annabelle’s plan. Georgie and Melanie didn't believe in the cult, but in the end it didn’t matter, they went along with the plan anyway.

Georgie says the cult just sort of happened. I think Laverne is concealing that she is the driving force behind it. When Martin asks Laverne about the cult, Laverne seems rational:

“Personally, I don’t know what I believe. I saw Melanie every week for months, and if you’d asked if I thought she was a ‘holy person’, I’d have laughed. (...) But. The world is… well, I mean, it’s hell, isn’t it? Whether it’s a capital-H hell or not, I don’t know, but that’s where we are. And Melanie and Georgie, they can walk through it completely untouched. They can… rescue people, even if they can’t always protect them. I’ve listened to their own explanation of it, and I’ve listened to Danielle call them “prophets” or “angels” or “the chosen”. Neither of them really makes any sense. But… you’ve got to have hope in something, otherwise there’s no point to anything. So, I choose to have hope in them.”

But when none of the Archivist gang is around she sounds all mystical:

“Laverne: Celia… just trust them. “They walk this world above the nightmare. It will not take them.”

Celia: Yeah, you’re right. Of course. You’re right.”

I think she’s mind controlling Celia.

Melanie made up a vision that the hell world would end. Might be the reason Laverne’s plan didn’t work. Hard for Melanie to believe in something she made up.

In The Worms Annabelle calls Martin and tries to manipulate him into breaking up with John. Then in Curiosity, John tells Martin that Martin is the reason for John to keep going. Annabelle does want John to keep going, so this must be where she changes her plans. She doesn't want Martin and John to split up. She makes a new plan involving Martin.

John doesn’t want to go along with Annabelle’s plan to send the fears to other universes. But he gives his lighter to Georgie, not realizing how significant that is. When Martin says he sent the others ahead to blow up the panopticon, John thinks they can’t, that they don’t have the lighter. Then he rather suddenly changes his mind and goes along with Annabelle’s plan. For Martin’s sake. John is influenced by the Web.

In Last Words John implies the Web used the Eye as its fool to bring about the apocalypse. Which suggests Jonah Magnus might have been influenced by the Web as well. In A Stern Look, original Elias sees a spider in Jonah’s office, perhaps indicating Jonah is influenced.

#the magnus archives #tma #magnuspod #georgie barker #melanie king

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acetone-free · 4 years

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Getting the Dames and Dragons wiki up and running proper

Hello!!!

So I’ve been editing and adding to the Dames and Dragons fan wiki for about a year now. I’m an admin and bureaucrat and all that jazz but to be honest the wiki totally needs a revamp and I would really love some help with it!! If you would be interested in writing or editing some stuff please check out the bit under the cut!

Thank you! :D

First off: Transcripts

@camomilafil got the ball rolling on the transcript front in 2018, but since then only 19 have been completed. I’ve done a couple myself, so I know that they can be pretty high effort and time consuming. But at the rate that they’re going right now Torva will have been defeated and the Guardian’s will have started their true quest of destroying Dawson before episode 50 even has a google doc.

Creating transcripts not only makes the podcast more accessible, but they also make a super good information base for pages on the wiki. Writing episodes and character pages is made so much easier when you can CTRL F for keywords on a transcript doc, rather than having to re-listen to specific episodes.

At this point there are only four more episodes to transcribe for Into Avelis, but I think it would be really good if people were to begin transcribing later arcs as well. I would love to be able to stay on top of current episodes.

If you are interested in transcribing, you can find a guide on how to format here and the master doc of all episodes here. I’ve only added a little bit to the original rules of the transcribing doc, but I think they were helpful additions :). Keep in mind, you don’t have to transcribe a full episode, or even format any of it. Every little bit helps and even just doing a minute or two is awesome of you!

Secondly: Wiki Pages

Arc and Episode summaries

So far I am up to episode 16 for the summaries. I’m trying to transcribe a few episodes ahead because personally I find it way easier to write a summary with a transcript than while listening to the episode. However, you absolutely don’t have to have a transcript to write an episode summary. On the wiki I have created a page for every Arc so far (except for The Survivor's Ballad, I’ll get on that soon hehe), with an episode table so it should be pretty easy to see episodes that need summarising.

If you don't want to summarise an entire episode but do want to help, please, please, please feel free to go back and edit episode summaries from Arc 1. I made those about a year ago before I really had a good idea on how to summarise and trust me, those bad boys are rough to read. I’ve been planning on going back and redoing those for a while now lmao.

Otherwise, whole Arc summaries also need to be written. I’ve already done one for Arc 1, so that should give you a good idea on the type of detail needed.

For writing episode or arc summaries, I would say try to keep them around 1000 words and generally don’t write anything too meta. Try to keep it as in the world as possible. That being said, it’s totally cool if the summaries aren’t Serious Retellings. I usually try to do jokey subheadings and stuff like that.

There are a few more things I think are important to keep in mind while writing episode summaries, and if people express interest I am totally down in writing a guide to how I have been doing it. The best thing I think to do would be to go and read a couple of the summaries already on the wiki. Preferably from Arc 2 because I wasn't kidding about the quality of the ones from Arc 1.

Place and People pages

Hehe alliteration.

Just to get it out there: The main Guardians’ and Maeri’s pages totally need revising. They need summaries for their actions in each arc, as well as updates on their personality sections because these dudes have gone through character development. So if you wanna start somewhere, I’d say go ahead and do that.

Otherwise, here's what I think you should do if you want to write a character or location page: Choose your favourite character or location or item or whatever. Figure out exactly what episodes they are in, listen to them, take notes, and then write the page. If you’re feeling frisky, even transcribe the parts of the episodes that they appear in.

Once again, I think the best thing to do is to read a few characters or location pages to get an idea of the amount of detail needed as well as what type of sections you should write. Like, their personality and appearance and whether or not to separate their page into episode summaries or arc summaries for that location/character. If people want, I can also make a more thorough guide on how to write these pages.

To be honest I haven’t done many of these because I’ve been more focused on getting transcripts and summaries out. So far, however, I’ve been doing these pages as I go. If a new NPC is introduced and only appears for an episode or two, I’ll write those character pages as I’m writing the episode summaries. That being said, if an NPC is introduced and I know they’ll appear later down the line I’ll usually compile all information I have on them in a separate google doc and wait until later to write they’re page. The same goes for location pages, really. For example, I have a google doc full of a half-written page on Danmar that I haven’t published yet because I know that in about five transcribed episodes the party will be back there and I don’t want to have to edit it a whole bunch.

Thirdly: Editing

If you don’t really want to write an entire summary or don’t feel comfortable enough to do so but still want to contribute the absolute most helpful and important thing you can do it edit. The wiki is like, full of typo’s my dude. (Totally my bad, I’m really bad at catching them hehe). Not only that, but it would be really good if people were to fix any grammar issues or any incorrect information within the pages themselves. Broken links, missing info, inconsistencies in categorisation, all that good stuff.

You could also go through and double check transcripts that have been deemed ‘complete’ for any typos or formatting issues, if you wished. Absolutely anything and everything helps and it’s always good to have a second or third pair of eyes.

Fourthly: Where to start

Here’s a list of wanted pages on the wiki. For anyone unfamiliar with how fan wikis work, a red link indicates that the page hasn’t yet been written but has been linked in another page, and that’s where you come in, my dude.

You don’t have to write a full on, in depth complete page. Even just creating the page and beginning to summarise is great. That creates a basis for other editors, allowing people to build on what you have started.

If you want to start a transcription you absolutely have to read the formatting and editing guide, linked here once again. Do your best to follow those rules, but it’s okay if you forget or miss some here or there. That’s why other people double check your work! This is collaborative and you can’t be expected to do everything right in the beginning.

A Final Word

I think it would be cool if we got a few more people to semi-consistently edit and add to the wiki. I don’t expect many people, but any addition to it makes it a better compendium.

If anyone wants to start writing stuff for it but feels like they need direction please message me! I’m sure I can find something fun for you to do :). Again, I think I’ll write some more in depth guides for how to write pages on the wiki, but if you want to do transcriptions the instructions are already in place and good to go.

That being said, I don’t completely know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to write any of the cool formatting code and stuff that some wiki’s have, so if anyone is interested in helping create a more fancy-schmancy lookin’ wiki and knows how to do all that, it would be really cool if you could get in touch with me as well.

I would love to hear any other questions or suggestions! To anyone who chooses to help, thank you in advance!

#dames and dragons #maeri the survivor #maeri #fran #corbin #laika #slake

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canonicallysoulmates · 4 years

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Last week Jensen was on Rosenbaum’s podcast, this week it’s Jared’s turn. Just like with Jensen’s I recommend checking Jared’s out it is for free on youtube, I will be linking to it at the end of this post, and I also recommend checking out his first appearance on Rosenbaum’s podcast.

While Jensen’s appearance was recorded in the beginnings of the boys Vancouver quarantine, Jared’s was recorded a little more recently after the boys had resumed production and when they were starting on the final episode nonetheless if you are looking for information regarding Supernatural and/or the final epis you will not find them here, Jared actually didn’t talk much about the show. He did however open up about some topics including his arrest.

Of course, they are two different people whose interviews were done at different moments in time and who got asked different questions but this had a very different feel from Jensen’s; while Jensen’s felt more interview like, this felt very much like a conversation between two friends who’ve known each other for years....the majority of the time.

Here’s the thing, and some of y’all are not gonna like me for this....while the conversation had its deep moments and Jared opened up about some personal stuff it felt to me like a more open version of how he is in conventions. Which is not a bad thing! But it’s not like last time where he was, imo, a version of himself that only those in his circle might get to hear. There was some fuckery people, okay? There was some fuckery and we will be talking about it.

I am going to put a disclaimer here, just in case, that this post is not going to be G*nevieve friendly. Or friendly towards her and Jared’s “marriage”.

Before we get into what Jared said and talked about, I do want to take a minute to acknowledge and say condolences to Rosenbaum and his family, one of his sisters recently passed away after being sick pretty much her whole life.

I also wanna say real quickly that something that I really like, and I would say even respect, about Rosenbaum is how open he is about things and listening to the intro of this “episode” made me realize why it is that he gets his guests to open up so often; I think it’s because he himself is open about his struggles and his issues and he is free of judgement so if you confess to something stupid he’s not gonna judge you for it, he’s also willing to cut things out if his guests ask him too so his guests know they can talk to him and he will understand and not judge them and will respect their privacy and cut something out if they ask it of him so they can talk freely.

Okay, after all that let’s get into what Jared said and talked about in the podcast. FYI, much like in the Jensen post, from here forth Rosenbaum will be referred to as MR for convenience.

- The conversation starts on what I considered to be a funny note with Jared talking about his infrared sauna blanket which he travels with that is such a weird item to travel with I can’t with the white richness of it all but hey we all got our quirks 😂

- After that the conversation turns pretty serious and deep, he talked about Sadie and having to make the decision to put her to sleep. He was tearing up talking about it, and I’m not gonna lie I myself was crying - hell I’m tearing up as I’m writing this not just because I can’t handle seeing this man cry but because I know what he’s talking about, I know that pain, I know what he meant by Sadie looking at him like it was time for her to go, I know what it’s like to be in that room with a beloved pet as they’re taking their last breath...I have had to put two of my cats to sleep in the past and it’s the most difficult and heartbreaking decision one sometimes has to make as a pet owner. 😔

- Something I like about when MR and Jared talk to each other is that they have very similar personalities in some ways and they’re good friends so when they’re talking it very quickly turns into two friends talking to one another which means the conversation is all over the place. In a good way. They got into a conversation about living in the moment and how social media and cell phones can affect that; I, personally, found it fascinating. I love hearing them discuss their different POV’s about these types of topics.

- And here’s where we get to the fake. I’m writing this post at an extremely late hour but I’m determined to get it up before I go to bed and I really wanna go to bed, so I’m gonna try to get through this as fast as possible so strap in cause there’s a lot of bullshit to quickly wade through in this section.

Jared starts praising the fuck out of G like this man was going for it, he was really pilling it on nice and thick. So, there I am watching this with my eyes about to roll right out of my skull wondering what was up with all the fuckery cause there’s being civil and a gentleman and then there was this when a light bulb goes off above my head 💡: When this was filmed, he already knew she had been cast to play his wife on Walker, he probably figured out that by the time this aired either the news would have already been out or would be announced soon so he’s hyping her up in the only way he knows how which works anyways cause the character she’s playing is his wife and her likability is in part going to rely on people overlooking her bad acting and the nepotism to focus on her being married to Jared in real life cause people love when irl couples work together even more when they’re playing a couple. From what I’ve seen it makes people less likely to call out a lack of chemistry cause then they feel like they’re insulting the couple.

He hypes her up using the same script he and Jensen have used in the convention circuit for years when it comes to praising the wives complete with classics such as ‘i’m never home so i never knew she did so much’ and ‘i ask her what i can do and she tells me to take out the garbage’. Nothing new is added to the script, he doesn’t go into details about what makes her amazing or about “all she does” he just pretty much says over and over that she’s incredible and does so much, if he meant it and she really does “so much” why not go into detail? It’d be so easy of him to say something like ‘oh, she’s always making us healthy meals and trying out new recipes’ which can be backed up by her insta because during quarantine she did a bunch of insta stories about cooking and checking out recipe books like goddamn Jared if you’re gonna lay it thick at least put in the effort even I could hype her up better and I don’t even like her.

It all comes off as very insincere, have y’all ever seen somebody talk about the person they love? You can tell in their voice, in their eyes, some even get a fond little smile. It’s actually quite cute to watch but there’s none of that here, even when he mentions G giving birth there’s no emotion there’s no sincerity, it’s like he’s saying all the right things but he doesn’t believe them. It reminds me off- have you ever had someone, maybe it’s a friend or a romantic partner or whatever just someone who you’re introducing to somebody else or a group of people and you really need them to like this person you’re introducing so you start to sell them meaning you just start singing their praises to an over the top extend as if you were a car dealer trying to boost up their merch? Yeah, it’s like that.

I don’t believe for one second that she volunteered to go with him to Van so he wouldn’t be alone like Jared go to somebody else with that story 🙄

I did have to laugh at some parts cause he was laying it on thick as if I didn’t remember and know that he looked miserable in almost all the pics G posted of him from quarantine right from the beginning, and being all ‘she doesn’t have any time for herself’ well clearly she found some time cause she does her little yoga collabs, she’s had her little photo shoots, she’s done a bunch of sponsored ads, she did her clothing collab with Kohl’s, she started a book club clearly she has the fucking time to do things for herself and pursue hobbies. He also said with three kids he didn’t have time for himself which I found funny because I don’t know if y’all remember this but early on in the quarantine Jared and G did a livestream and in it he mentioned several times that he was using his time for phone calls and even way too seriously said he was handling cabin fever by hiding and letting G handle the kids so....

It’s also an interesting contrast between what Jensen said in his podcast appearance because while Jared tried to make it sound as if G had no time for herself and like that’d be impossible with three kids, Jensen pretty much said the opposite, he said that he and D would sometimes take the kids and entertain them so the other one could have some space to do their own thing, and even gave an example of settling the kids with a movie so the parents can have their own space at the same time.

- Moving on from that fuckery, the rest of the conversation was very deep and interesting. He talked about going to therapy and once again mentions being afraid of fucking up his kids, but adds that he’s come to realize that no matter what he does he’s gonna fuck up his kids anyways cause that’s what every parent does even if they’re amazing. This is a statement that I very much agree with it doesn’t matter how amazing a parent is they’re gonna make mistakes and fuck you up.

He talked about his anxiety and his depression and how he doesn’t like to say he suffers from it because it makes him sound like a victim he prefers to say he deals with anxiety.

This is gonna sound so weird but I loved something Jared said about death, MR talked about his anxiety and he said that his psychologist told him anxiety is always in the backseat and a. that is so true I think pretty much anybody who suffers from anxiety can tell you that it’s always there but b. Jared mentioned that he head somebody talk about death the same way, that death is always in the passenger seat but they become a friend. I know for some this might sound concerning or macabre but personally I think this is the best way to think about death not as something to hate but as a friend who is always besides you and that doesn’t mean you’re in any rush to welcome its embrace but it does mean you don’t fear it.

He said that now a days if he wakes up and doesn’t feel anxiety he’s like ‘what’s wrong?’ which honestly relatable af

And I am paraphrasing btw, this is the cliffnotes version of a very deep in-depth part of the conversation between him and MR starting when they’re talking about therapy the whole thing is very interesting I’m not doing it justice.

- Towards the end of the podcast Jared opened up about his arrest. He said he has no real recollection of what happened, he doesn’t know if maybe he was drugged or just got black out drunk but he doesn’t remember the fight he just remembers up to the point of going to his friends bar. He has seen the security tapes of that night, saying he didn’t recognize himself due to the way he was acting. He thinks perhaps because he has been jumped before that maybe he acted on instinct to fight back. It is not something he is proud of and he doesn’t make excuses, he knows he fucked up. He also says he has not drank since then.

I am very proud of him for opening up about this, and for either quitting or limiting his alcohol consumption - quite honestly I’m not sure if he has full on stopped drinking or if he is just limiting himself to only once in a blue moon cause I do know people, hell I am one of these people, I don’t drink 99% of the time but if it’s a special occasion or I’m just chilling with someone I know and they’re having a drink I might have one or a sip or two so technically I don’t drink so I don’t know if maybe that’s what he’s decided to do or if he’s quit alcohol forever, either way I’m very proud of him. I’m proud of him for opening up about this and for talking about his mental health and therapy.

With the exception of some fuckery he really did open up about some things and I highly recommend giving it a listen/watch because when it’s the real him talking it’s a very insightful conversation.

Inside of you | Jared Padalecki

#anti genevieve #not even sure what to tag this as and frankly #i am exhausted #so proper tagging will have to wait for my brain cells to come back #also yes i am aware it is wednesday shush just pretend it's tuesday cause i worked too hard on this to wait till thursday to post it okay?#when i come back after hopefully sleeping more than an hour we'll start our regular wednesday programming #mine #annianvi

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shadowdianne · 3 years

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I was tagged by @lulysmalforge, let’s see what I have to say xd

Rules: Tag 9 people you wanna catch up with/know better -if you want, if you don’t feel like answering you obviously don’t need to-

3 ships : Ah, the first question but the one I left for last Xd Ships? The ever given works?

Nah, ok Xd Ships. After leaving SQ I haven’t actively shipped anything with the exception of BeauYasha -Those of you who like dnd or have enough time to do things/work but need something to listen to seriously go with me down the rabbit hole that is dnd games on podcast/video format. Seriously. It doesn’t even need to be Critical Role, there are a lot of dnd podcasts these days- who are characters from the current CR campaign and if anyone is craving a true slow-burn with AMAZING tact and respect on what means to grow as a person, mourn past relationships, the insufferable hope that romance always comes with and the so so tender way in where two people can found each other amongst the most interesting circumsnaces all the while with their conjoined found family trying their best to see them happy… seriously, delve into CR.

Aside from that and despite the bitterness SQ will always and forever be the ship that marked me the most -glances at their a03 account-, clearly.

As for the third ship… Cissamione counts? I love them, a lot, both the concept and the fanon ways in where they are constantly being created. I truly need to sit my ass and write a little bit more of them at some point.

Last song: According to Spotify “Villain” by Stella Jang

Last movie: LOTR I would say. I watched it again couple of weeks ago with @roomiesnotsecrettmblr. Majorly because she admitted that she hadn’t watched any of the movies and we had some time to kill so what to do best but spend some hours watching the first movie and stopping every other minute to comment on lore? We are horrible at watching a movie without stopping to go into a tangent -seriously horrible, we started a rewatch of Merlin and we needed to stop doing that because we couldn’t go about one episode without pressing stop and start talking about possible interpretations of the lore used within the series every other minute-

Currently watching: Now that I’m in the painting minis thingie I’m catching up and watching random episodes of Critical Role. Majorly because I obviously adore the campaigns and secondly because each episode is four/five hours long so I have plenty of time to paint while listening. I’m also rewatching Castle majorly because it’s “popcorn” for the brain. I’ve watched it enough to remember every episode, I don’t need to be too focused on it and I can press “halt” on my brain while doing it. Jujutsu Kaisen as well because I happen to live with someone who adores mangas/anime and she is bringing me back to that world xD

Currently reading:

Books: With the series of Shadow and Bone looming and after finishing a quick re-read of both Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, I’m re reading the original trilogy of the Grishaverse. I was never a fan of those three books but the world felt very very compelling to me. While the romantic aspect of the drama tires me even more than it did once the rules of the Grishaverse are still so fucking cool so I’m enjoying the re-read Xd -Even if I already know the series is gonna be a clusterfuck. Come on, I also want to go to Ketterdam and see Kaz and the others but mixing both timelines??? According to what we get to see in Six of Crows Inej shoulnd’t already be with Kaz at the beginning of S&B or, if she was, she wouldn’t be the Wraith yet but still learning and cleansing herself from Tante Heleen. They are doing this because they originally wanted Six of Crows rather than the Alina Starkov storyline and mixing both is something that is already making me worry-

[Also reading CandleKeep mysteries just because roomie happened to get a copy of the book and despite being a dnd manual I always take them as bedtime stories I can later on create upon so that’s fun]

Oh! And I finished with a quick re-read of @emmasternerradley SilverBeasts because I promised that I was going to do a proper review of the second book of that story and I wanted to refresh my mind a little bit before going back to Golden Sea. I truly TRULY recommend anything written by her but those two books?? A must if you like fantasy.

Comic/Webcomic: Re-reading Sunstone atm as well. I just adore their dynamic and visually the comic is to die for. Also reading Lore Olympus every other week ofc. I truly want to know where they will go with the story. And punderworld whenever I can. And several others xD

Fanfic: Not much from me on that front currently. I recently re-read @delirious-comfort Whispers in the Night -SQ, so good- but, yup, other than that I’m staying slightly off fandom world.

Currently craving: TIME

Not shown in the original tag-game but random recs of things because I happen to want for more people to read/listen to them:

The Priory of the Orange Tree

Gideon and Harrow the Ninth -both books, yup, trust me-

The city and the city by China Mieville -well, anything from him really but I get not wanting to read Perdido Street Station because THAT is a thick boi and while I’m crazy and I started from there it’s quite a lot. If you like sci-fi and constant evolving conversation on how linguistics work, I then rec Embassytown from him-

Spotify’s Meija’s Army playlist

Tagging:

@waknatious @stregaomega -how are you dear?- @pressuredrightnow @naralanis @ryshai @drummergirl72713 @idontgetpaidforthis (this is not a tag for you per se but a reminder to check your twitter :P) @alternate8reality annnnd @godandmonsters1996

#tag thingie #what was my tagging for this again?#uh #welp

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skold · 3 years

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so since i have received a bunch of messages about it at this point i wanna address it cuz i can’t keep talking about it

on wednesday ERW shared a post from zombinatrix on instagram about a podcast in which she talks about how john 5 “raped her 16 year old friend“. i don’t have a screencap and it’s easy to find if you go to op’s instagram.

i cannot listen to the podcast because it includes really graphic accounts of op being raped/abused by manson, however i have dug through all the comments on both her ig post and the public patreon post with the podcast attached. here’s what i’ve gathered

this happened in 1999. op was 19 and her friend was 16. they got backstage or otherwise into the after party; i’m not sure which.

the sexual contact the friend had with john was otherwise consensual.

either she did not disclose her age, she lied about her age, john did not ask her age, or john assumed she was 18+ based on the fact that she was backstage/at the after party

here’s some information i know about john in regard to his sexual activities with fans, both from him directly and from reading stories from fans who had sexual contact with him

john had a crew member whose job was specifically to go find girls in line to go give backstage passes to. part of that crew member’s job was to ID the girls to confirm they weren’t minors.

he was sometimes having sexual contact with 3-5 women in one day.

john did not have PIV sex with “groupies”. he’s said this himself on jamey jasta’s podcast in an episode that is now behind a paywall because he didn’t want to risk having more kids since he already had two at the time. he only had manual/oral sex or other outercourse.

every “groupie” story i have read about john both corroborates the above point and indicates that he was incredibly nice and polite and didn’t pressure them into doing anything with them. this is from dozens of stories i’ve read.

as far as john’s character in general, i have never heard anyone say anything even slightly remotely bad about him. not a fan, not musicians he’s worked with, not other industry members, not music journalists.

so, this is what i believe to have happened. again i want to stress i have not listened to the podcast in which the accuser’s friend tells the full story, but it would be incredibly triggering for me and i have already been in a bad place mentally for a myriad of reasons

it seems the friend either lied about her age or had a fake ID to get into the after party or backstage, OR op being of age meant she was able to get the friend in.

if the friend was talking to john, there’s a very good chance john assumed his crew guy who found girls for him had already IDed her.

i don’t know what kind of sexual contact the friend had with john, but if she says they had PIV sex, i don’t believe that aspect of it. manual/oral or outercourse i would 100% believe.

and here’s my thoughts on the situation

is it partially john’s responsibility to confirm a girl is of age before having sexual contact with her? yes. can he be held fully accountable if she lied or didn’t disclose or had a fake ID? absolutely not.

i can imagine what happened to this girl WAS traumatizing regardless of whether she “consented”. i believe her 100%.

i also understand that people who are under the age of 18 cannot legally consent to sex, and that john having sexual contact with a 16 year old girl is technically statutory rape.

that said, i do not think 16/17 year olds are helpless children who can’t make questionable choices. i also do not think that having otherwise consensual sex with a 16/17 year old is as “Bad” of a crime as forcibly raping a person who is of age. i just don’t. and that’s IF the adult knows they are underage.

i also just tend to assume that any “rock star” type who was big in the 80s/90s fucked around with a few 16/17 year old girls, whether they were aware of her age or not. i know we all hate when people say “it was a different time” but pre-social media it was SO easy to lie about these kinds of things and also get away with shady shit. doesn’t make it okay. it was just a different social context.

again. I HAVE NOT LISTENED TO THE FULL PODCAST. if anyone has or would be willing to and could share any details with me i would love to know more so i can add to or amend this post to be more accurate to the events and my own feelings.

as of right now i do not believe john had any intent to have sexual contact with minors in any way, let alone malicious intent to violate their limits and consent.

#rape tw #abuse tw #post about john #<-- so i can find this later

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tunkyra · 3 years

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Today, I decided to listen to Distractible for the first time while doing my Microbiology notes. And I didn’t regret one second of it.

I have been watching Markiplier for years on end, and the Three Peens in a Pod was one of the best part of his channel. I think Bob and Wade deserves a shit ton more credits than they are currently receiving, because Mark by himself was entertaining enough, but boy the three of them was powerful enough to send me to Pluto just with the gas I let out as I laugh and fart at the same time.

Honestly, I don’t have a clue why I procrastinated for so long when it comes to listening to Distractible. I’ve always loved to listen to videos while doing other stuffs, so the idea of a podcast is supposed to be as interesting. But something just doesn’t sit right about podcasts to me for some reason. Probably ADHD schticks. But when Mark mentioned a couple times already in his videos that Bob had a rage fit while getting his new refrigerator installed and it was effing beautiful, I knew I had to listen to it sooner or later.

Mark was right. The ‘Bob’s fridge’ episode was a chef kiss kind of perfect. It was as hilarious as the most hilarious thing you’ll ever find on earth. It had drama, conflict, buildup, the climax, the setup…. everything about the episode was world class. I find myself unable to hide my grin throughout the entire episode, I looked like I was plotting a bank heist, but I don’t care. Mark was right, Bob’s rage fit was the most hilarious thing in the world and I live by it every day.

However, that is not my point for this post.

Bob’s fridge episode got me hungry for more, so I listened to another episode called “Supernatural”. Bob went first with his fabricated story titled Seasons Don’t Fear the Reaper, They Fear the Titties and went on how his ‘mother made him obey curfew hours or he would be smothered to death by one hantu tetek’.

Hold up.

Excuse me, what?

Hantu…. tetek?

Am I hearing this right?

FYI, I am born and raised Malaysian. And therefore, I understood exactly what the two words meant. What my brain could not register is that that word was coming from the mouths of three Americans with millions of followers combined and probably did not know my dinky country existed. Am I sure I was listening to Markiplier and his two side chicks? Yah, I sure was.

First thing first, thank you for embracing the not-so-graceful part of the Malaysian culture, one that I have not heard in years. Yes, I validate that that folklore does exist, and I have heard a lot about it. Though, my version was a tiny bit different, as my uncle used to call me the hantu tetek, because as a baby I gave no mercy to my mother when it comes to breastfeeding time. The interpretation is universal, it’s up to you to take from any angle.

So, I’ll tell you what I know about the hantu tetek.

On a typical basis we refer it more as a hantu kopek than a hantu tetek, my guess was because the word tetek is actually a rather vulgar word in Malay. So much so that we prefer to call breasts as buah dada (literally translated as breast fruits lol). Kopek is apparently also used to describe breasts, which is why this term is also used to address this creature. Calling around that t-word is bad enough to be considered as insult and in my personal reference, I also am not comfortable in saying that word a lot. So, for the sake of my sanity, I will address this creature as either hantu kopek or just, it.

Another possible reason of why the name hantu kopek is more familiar is because it was popularised by a locally renowned Hantu Kak Limah universe, which the antagonistic ghost Kak Limah was a hantu kopek herself (or is she? I can’t remember). Majority of my generation (including myself) came to know of this creature thanks to this film series, but the story of it has been lingering in our customs for nobody knows how long. For decades, or maybe centuries, parents had been using this name to scare the children from going back home past dusk, a time where they believed the devilish syaitan starts to roam the horizon.

The practice of scaring the shit out of a child with unnatural stories to coerce them into obedience is common back then, when formal education isn’t a thing. In fact, there is an astronomical amount of ridiculous stories similar to this one, some of which we still follow to this day, for the sake of conserving our beautiful (and terrifying) customs.

Some remarks I would make of Bob’s presentation of the hantu kopek:

Bob : it is a non-fiction.

Me : As much as you freaks wanna believe it exists, it is sadly a fiction. It does not exist, there’s no known encounters with one hantu kopek, even from people who works with supernatural beings for a living. It was made up solely to prevent young men from going back late by dusk.

Bob : it smothers you to death with its humongous bazongas.

Me : Technically yea, but historically accurate hantu kopeks is said to actually kidnap young lads and hid them under their comically schlong honkers.

So that concludes my little knowledge about a crack of the traditional Malay folklore. Anyway, I enjoyed the Distractible podcast so much, and I am sure you will enjoy too. Please check them out and spread the joy!

Distractible is available on everywhere you think you can find podcasts, including Spotify! #notsponsored

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lingthusiasm · 3 years

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Transcript Episode 50: Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 50: Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 50 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about sonority. But first, Happy Anniversary Lingthusiasm Month.

Gretchen: Happy Anniversary, Lauren!

Lauren: Happy Anniversary, Gretchen! It’s been four years of Lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Which is kind of amazing. We launched with three episodes in December 2016, but we celebrate the anniversary in November because we were recording them in advance.

Lauren: It’s also our 50th main episode. Those couple of extra episodes that we launched with explain why it’s not something divisible by 12. We’re so excited to hit our 50th episode of main Lingthusiasm episodes in our anniversary month.

Gretchen: It’s a nice round number for another nice round number. Thank you to everybody who has already shared a link to your favourite episode or just your excitement about Lingthusiasm in honour of our anniversary. There’s still another week to do that within our anniversary month. Of course, we welcome this all year round as well. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, and a lot of people don’t yet realise they could be having a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month – or in their eyes because all our episodes also have transcripts.

Lauren: As with every year at our anniversary in particular, we’re asking you to help us connect with people who would be totally interested in a linguistics podcast if only they knew lingthusiasm existed.

Gretchen: We’ve done this call for extra sharing of the Lingthusiasm every year on our anniversary, and we always see in the stats that your recommendations really do help more people find the show. If you share it on social media, tag us. We’ll reply. We’ll like your tweet. We’ll try to reshare it on our Instagram story and whatever else is applicable. Or if you just send it to one person in private, we won’t know about it, but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction. Feel free to tell us about it on social media if you wanna be thanked.

Lauren: As well as our 50 main episodes, we have over 45 bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm. Our latest episode is a behind-the-scenes chat about writing the scripts for the Crash Course Linguistics series where we had Jessi Grieser along who was also part of that team.

Gretchen: If you’re looking for even more linguistics, we have also been co-writing the scripts for this big educational YouTube channel, which is Crash Course. If you want to watch some videos about linguistics as well and know that we were behind the words that the host is saying on those scripts, we’re really excited to share those as well and to get to share a bit of behind-the-scenes.

Lauren: You now have the option on Patreon to support at an annual level rather than at a monthly level of support. You can also choose from a range of currencies now, so there are some more options there. Annual subscriptions make a great last-minute gift if you’re still thinking about something for the holiday season for yourself or for someone else.

Gretchen: Of course, lingthusiasm merch and copies of Because Internet , now in paperback, also make great gifts, although you’ll have to keep an eye on timing for whether they can be shipped in time. Digital gifts are also great.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, I’ve been getting really into crossword puzzles lately.

Lauren: That is a wholesome hobby to have.

Gretchen: I feel like it’s just one of those things you do on your phone a bit mindlessly. Crossword puzzles always make me think about the way that individual letters – English letters – can combine with each other in particular patterns. Because you’re trying to fill in a particular range of words, and you’re like, “That has to be a vowel there,” or like, “That could be a vowel or an R or an L.” There’s only so many things that could in this slot when you’re trying to guess the words you don’t know.

Lauren: My grandpa taught me to do crossword puzzles, and I feel like I had a really good appreciation for what made an English consonant cluster well before I studied linguistics and learnt about things like syllables and phonotactics, which is the fancy way of saying “syllable structure.”

Gretchen: Yeah. And it’s not just, you know, okay, I wanna cheat at Scrabble, or I wanna like, okay, what if I came up with some –

Lauren: If you wanna cheat, you want to optimise your ability to play Scrabble based on your linguistic analysis abilities.

Gretchen: I think in many cases word games like crossword puzzles or Scrabble are often the ways people think about, okay, which things are more likely to be at the beginning of a syllable or at the end of a syllable, or which kinds of combinations like, “Oh, I’ve got an S and a T and an R here. Maybe I can make a word that begins with /stɹ/.” But I’m not gonna be able to make a word that begins with like /ltɹs/. Those sorts of things, at a very broad level, are also the kinds of things that linguists think about when it comes to which types of syllable structures are characteristics of some languages and which ones aren’t.

Lauren: We’ve talked about the International Phonetic Alphabet before – and bits and pieces of it including just specifically the vowels. The International Phonetic Alphabet is this way of representing all of the possible sounds in human spoken languages. There’s something about this chart, like the “Periodic Table of Sounds,” it all seems very – all sounds are equal, all sounds have a set of properties, and they’re all just there. But when we actually look at how sounds are put together in speech, we find that not all sounds necessarily exist in the same spaces.

Gretchen: There’s a sense in which there are certain things you can do with certain sounds, at least in English, if we start with English, and then there’re things you don’t do with them any other way. If we think about words in English can begin with groups of consonants like B-R, B-L, K-R, K-L, G-L, G-R, D-R. You can often have this R or L in the second position at the beginning of a word. The inverse isn’t in the case. At the beginning of a word you don’t have like, R-B or L-L or L-B.

Lauren: I like that your brain is actually struggling to even articulate these examples.

Gretchen: L-G. Because I’m trying to move them in my head as I’m doing them. You have a word in English like “trust” or “trend” which has T-R at the beginning, but you don’t have “rtuts” or “rtedn.” I can’t even – like, I have to say that with three syllables – /ɹə/ /tɛd/ /n̩/ – not “tennr.” Or you have something like “plant” but not “lpatn.”

Lauren: What is a possible combination and order at the start of a word is different to what’s a possible combination and order at the end of a word. We talked about this in our episode on syllables.

Gretchen: What’s interesting is that they kind of mirror each other. You have something like R-D at the end of a word or at the end of a syllable, or you can have D-R at the beginning, and in both cases, it’s the D that’s kind of on either side of the outskirts and the R that’s closer towards the centre – closer towards the vowel in the middle.

Lauren: I guess like “clean” and “milk” that /kl/ and then that /lk/ at the beginning and the end.

Gretchen: Yeah. There’s this weird thing that I’ve always found particularly peculiar about English where English for some reason doesn’t like having the same cluster at both the beginning and end at of the same syllable. So, “clean” and “milk,” as you said, totally fine, but if you try to say like “klilk” –

Lauren: /klɪ/?

Gretchen: /klɪlk/.

Lauren: /klɪ/ – I keep wanting to say “click.”

Gretchen: Or “klelk.” It’s somehow weirdly bad even though all of the constituent pieces are fine. It just – /klɛlk/. I mean, if you wanna make an alien language that’s still easy enough for English speakers to pronounce but sounds very distinctly un-English-y, that is one of your tickets to do that.

Lauren: Mirroring sounds at the beginning and end of the syllable. I’ll keep that in mind for the next weird conlang I have to create.

Gretchen: You notice this sort of mirroring thinking, “Okay, well, L is always happier” – you can have something that just begins with L and has nothing else, right. But this is in cases where you have complex consonant clusters. The L is always happier nearer the middle of the word – nearer with middle of the syllable. We’re just dealing with single syllable words because it’s more straightforward to look at them that way because you know all of the sounds have to belong to the same syllable if the word only has one syllable. Then K is happier on the outskirts. You can think of it like there’s a mountain, right, you know, you have the vowel is the peak of your mountain, and then on either side you have – so L is halfway down in both cases, and then K is down in two different valleys on either side. You start in the valley with one K, you go up to L, and you go up to the vowel, whatever it is, and then you can go back down to like, here’s an L or an R or something, and then you’re back down with K and P and B and all of those letters.

Lauren: The kinds of letters that hang out at different altitudes on our little mountain walk have similar properties. Maybe we should go for a little hike. Shall we start maybe at the top of the hill? Or get helicoptered in? Or maybe take a chair lift?

Gretchen: Let’s pretend we’ve gotten teleported in to the top of the mountain.

Lauren: Which is where our vowels hang out – vowels having the particular property in how they’re produced that you don’t close off anything in your squishy meat tube to produce a vowel. You can change the shape of it. That’s why we have different vowels. But it’s just a continuous airflow situation.

Gretchen: “Squishy meat tube” being the technical term for “vocal tract.” [Laughter] Vowels are a kind of thing that if you’re gonna have something in the middle of a syllable, it’s most likely to be a vowel.

Lauren: If you only have one thing in a syllable, it tends to be a vowel.

Gretchen: It tends to be a vowel. It’s not always a vowel. You can say, “Hm,” and there’s just an M hanging out being a syllable by itself. That’s not a vowel. But for the most part, at least in English, interjections like “Hm” and “Shhh” and stuff like that, those don’t have to have vowels in them. But there aren’t a lot of words that do this. So, you can have a word like “Hm” in English, but I you have “Ahh” and “Mmm” together in a single word, the “Ahh” is gonna grab the syllable spot first.

Lauren: And then descending downhill from vowels.

Gretchen: Some of the stuff involved in making diphthongs – if you wanna make something like /oɪ/ – /oːi/ – that’s like, “Oh, you’ve got two –a vowel and also a vowel-ish thing that you can still clump in with the vowel.” I think that’d be our next step down.

Lauren: Still very, very open and easy to sing, I guess, is a feature of this openness.

Gretchen: Yeah, your mouth is very open. There’s a lot of air still going though. It’s easy to sing. And now you’ve got your L and your R and other kind of L and R like sounds. Different languages do different things with the sounds we think of as L and R like.

Lauren: These are a really fun catch all category. We may have to talk about R sounds one day.

Gretchen: We have to do a whole episode about Ls and/or Rs because there’s a whole lot going on with them. They still have a fair bit of openness. You can think of /laaa/, /llllll/. There’s still a fair bit of air leaving your mouth while you’re making /llllll/. You can try it and really confuse the people around you. That’s the next step down the mountain. I feel like we’re now in mountain goat territory rather than snow caps or something. I don’t know how mountains work.

Lauren: We’re definitely near the treeline.

Gretchen: Okay. You know much more about mountains than I do. Then you’ve got your /m/ and /n/, all of your nasal sounds that you’ve got a certain amount of closure in your mouth, but your nose is making up for it.

Lauren: Still fun sing-y sounds if you hum along to some music.

Gretchen: Still extremely hum-able. Then you’ve got your sounds that you can still say by themselves like /ʃ/ and /s/ and /f/ and /z/ and stuff like this. You can still say them by themselves without another vowel to come along helping them. And you can think about this – if you have “freeze,” you have F and then R, and you’re heading up the mountain towards the middle vowel and then heading back down with the /z/. You can go through and think about, okay, what’s a bunch of monosyllabic English words with multiple consonants at the beginning or end? How can I re-constructure myself which bits should be on which parts of the scale?

Lauren: Another example from when were talking before about meat tubes would be “flesh.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: Then finally you’ve got your Ps and Bs and /k/, /g/, /t/, /d/ really hanging out at the bottom where you can’t make these without fully closing off the mouth for at least a split second.

Lauren: In fact, the only way we can really tell which sound you’re making very easily is because you stick a vowel there to help us hear the difference between a /p/ and a /t/.

Gretchen: This is a thing that really blew my mind when I was learning about sounds like this where you fully close off the air is that what’s actually going on here is your just hearing silence. Your brain is like, “Oh, no, you’re hearing a P” because it makes the following vowel P-like. But actually what’s there when you feel like you’re making it is just this brief split second of silence. You can see it show up on a wave form, but there’s nothing coming out.

Lauren: It’s a very exciting, very dynamic little valley that we’re in – all these stop-y sounds

Gretchen: These nice little staccatos popping off like firecrackers or something. You think you could put your firecrackers on the top of the mountains so people could see them better, but that’s not what our metaphor’s doing.

Lauren: That’s not how this metaphor’s going at all.

Gretchen: Well, you could think, well, what if we put those firecracker-y explosive sounds at a top of a different metaphorical mountain? But one thing that’s also relevant is that this is also a degree of loudness. You can make the sounds at the top of the mountain louder than you can make the sounds at the bottom.

Lauren: So, it’s partly about the openness and how easy they are to sing, but there’s also something to do with loudness happening here.

Gretchen: Well, and I think when your mouth is more open, you can be more loud with it. If you think about if you need to scream, you’re not gonna scream like /sss/. [Laughter] Or if you’re trying to really do some vocal warm up exercises, you’re gonna be like /aaa/ or something. You’re not gonna be like –

Lauren: /pə pə pə pə pə pə pə/.

Gretchen: I mean, I guess you could do that. That is true.

Lauren: But that’s really the vowel happening there not the /p/.

Gretchen: It’s not /p p p p p p p/. If you’re trying to be really loud or really project, you’re doing that with the vowels and the ones that are closer up on the vowel mountain. If you think about the mountain as a loudness amplitude mountain, the louder stuff is on top.

Lauren: All these different points along our walk down the mountain have been visiting different ways that we use the mechanics of the mouth to make sounds, which is something that linguists refer to as “manner of articulation.” It’s one of those features that’s represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Gretchen: And the International Phonetic Alphabet kind of does the inverse metaphor where they put the most closed ones at the top and then they go gradually down until the most open ones. You have to kind of flip it upside down to get the mountain, but they’re still doing this sounds exist on a continuum from how open or how closed or how singable or how unsingable they are. That’s relevant not just in terms of, okay, how can we describe them, but in terms of how can we put a word together? What happens when you’re trying to put a syllable together? Languages tend to have this preference which shows up across a lot of different languages for making a syllable that has one mountain top and its peak, even if it doesn’t contain absolutely every single point along that path because that would probably be too heavy of a syllable for most purposes. But if you’re gonna pick stuff from along that path, you’re gonna do that in a particular order. This comes in handy when you’re trying to make up plausible non-words as well. So, “blick” is a plausible non-word in English. It’s not really a word as far as I know, but it could be. Someone could have a start-up called “Blick,” and you’d be like, “Ah, yeah. That’s a thing.”

Lauren: I think it’s the word for “blink” in German.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah! I think it is – like in “Augenblick.”

Lauren: Which is always why it’s very good to double check if your nonsense words in one language are in fact nonsense words in another language if you’re expanding your analysis.

Gretchen: Yeah, if you’re starting up a start-up. I don’t think that’s offensive to German speakers, but you do wanna double check these things.

Lauren: You do wanna check.

Gretchen: Yeah. Whereas something like “lbick” has that L-B in the other order, and suddenly you’re like, “Hmm.”

Lauren: “Blick” isn’t a word, but “lbick” is like very not a word in English. I feel, even with my limited knowledge of sounds in German, I feel confident that it’s not a word in German either.

Gretchen: With my slightly greater but still not particularly good knowledge of German I also feel very confident in saying this. But you can use it to create plausible non-words versus implausible non-words.

Lauren: That’s because those stop-y sounds are right in the valley at the edge of our little peak of sounds that we toured.

Gretchen: You’d be starting midway up the mountain, and then you’d be going down and then back up again. That’s just not a thing that languages like to do. They wanna do a smooth path.

Lauren: Languages are like me when it comes to climbing a mountain – trying to do it with as little effort as possible.

Gretchen: Well, but I actually think this is an effort thing not just in a metaphorical sense, right, because it is an openness of the mouth, and if you think about humans trying to conserve energy in terms of pronouncing things, it’s easier to do a smoother motion of like, my mouth is closed, and then it’s somewhat open, and then it’s really open, and then it’s somewhat closed, and then it’s closed again. That’s a smoother thing for humans to do gradually over hundreds and thousands of years to actually produce.

Lauren: We have these preferences for sure, yeah.

Gretchen: It’s not as much effort as climbing a mountain, but if you’re talking for hours and hours, it would pay off. Another example that’s in the interestingly non-word spectrum is you could have something like “bnick.” How do you feel about “bnick” as a non-word?

Lauren: Is it the name of a dish from a language other than English that is gonna be really tasty and I’m gonna love it? It’s not the worst non-word, but it’s not something I recognise.

Gretchen: Right. It’s somewhere between “blick” and “lbick” on the spectrum of like, okay, this doesn’t sound like it’s an English word. It could’ve been a word that was borrowed into English from a different language because it still sounds like maybe some language had this as a word, versus “lbick” – if I make it two syllables, it’s obviously fine. You can be like /l̩/ /bɪk/. Sure, that could be a word. But /lbɪk/, where I’m really trying to make them into one syllable, that one somehow, like, I don’t know if any language does this or, if they do, it would be a language that I would have a lot of difficulty even learning how to pronounce. Whereas if I’m told like, oh, some language has this word “bnick,” I’m like, “Oh, okay. Well, I could learn how to produce that pretty easily.”

Lauren: Again, our stop-y B sound is further down the mountain than the nasal /n/ sound there, so it fits within this pattern as well.

Gretchen: Exactly. It’s a pattern that seems to show up similarly but also differently. Oh, that’s a specific way of saying things. In many different languages, there seems to be a general contour of a mountain here with vowels at the middle and things along the way that seems to apply to a lot of languages, but different languages do different things with how many places they let you pause along the mountain and pick something else up or how close those can be to each other – things like that.

Lauren: This property of sounds that changes from the top of our mountain all the way down is known in phonetics as “sonority” because the sounds at the top of the mountain are considered to be more sonorous, and then you have less sonorous sounds and less sonority as you go down the mountain.

Gretchen: Or sometimes people talk about the ones that are in the top half of the mountain as being “sonorants” – and the M and N, your nasals and above, are sonorants – and then your /ʃ/ and /s/ and /f/ and below are non-sonorants or “obstruents.” I think maybe linguists got tired of saying, “Well, it’s kind of singable, and its kind of how open your mouth is, it’s kind of like this thing. What if we gave this property a name, and we called it ‘sonorants’ even though” – sonority is one of those really interesting concepts to me because when you first encounter it, you’re like, “Wow! This explains everything!” And then you encounter more languages, or you go to grad school, or something, and then you’re like, “Oh, no. This doesn’t make sense at all. This explains nothing. Every language does it slightly differently. Maybe it doesn’t exist.” It can exist in both of those states at once where you’re like, on the one hand, this does actually seem to account for some stuff and, on the other hand, the details of how you wanna implement it can get really complicated really quickly.

Lauren: It is quite a squishy phenomenon. As you said, we can just categorise things as sonorants and non-sonorants. Then other people will do a really, really split-y analysis, and they’ll put sounds like /b/ and /g/ further up their little mountain than /p/ and /k/. We’ve just put all of our stop sounds at the very bottom of the valley, and other people will even try and split them up even further which for some languages and for some analyses makes a lot of sense, but we’re going to stick with a more broad categorisation, I think.

Gretchen: Right. You could try to split up your L-like sounds and your R-like sounds. For some languages, it might be useful to do this. Or you could split up F and S or something like this, or S and Z – or /z/. Again, for some languages, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, we really need to do it here.” It’s still kind of useful as a general property to say, well, the difference between these two groups of sounds seems to be sonority. Yet, for other languages, you’re like, “Naw, we can just lump them all together,” and they don’t really make a difference between them. It’s this interestingly slippery thing where, on the one hand, it probably exists because it does account for a bunch of stuff and, on the other hand, different languages seem to care about it to different degrees.

Lauren: When it comes to sonority, I don’t think there’s anything more slippery than the /s/ sound. It really illustrates how challenging it can be to work with sonority sometimes. S has this property – and it’s not just in English, it’s across a range of languages – where it is somewhere further up in our sonority hierarchy than stops, but it can occur outside of stops in our little consonant syllable set up. A word like “strong” or “splint” where we would expect something like a T or a P sound to be on the very outside, based on our mountain climbing metaphor, but the S sits outside of that.

Gretchen: I think when I first encountered this, I was like, “Look! S seems to be very clearly maybe below the Ts and Ps and so on. Why can’t we just put it below?” But the problem is it’s literally just S. It’s not any of the other sounds that are produced in a similar manner as S like /z/ or /f/ or /θ/ or /ð/ or all of these. They all seem to very happily behave like their cousins at this mid-level where you can do something like /pf/ – not so much in English, but you can do it in some languages. In German, you can have “Pfennig,” which is the old word for “penny,” which has a P-F at the beginning. Or in Greek you can do /ks/ or /ps/ like “psychology.” There’re lots of reasons to be like, oh, yeah, well, S seems to belong to this class of things, on the one hand, which is between – it’s definitely also the case you can do /sn/ like “snore” or “sneeze” or something like this. So, it should be below the nasals and it should be above the stops. It seems like is should belong to this category, and yet it’s also this massive exception that you can do all sorts of weird stuff with.

Lauren: I like it. It’s a free spirit.

Gretchen: Both at the beginning and the end. You can do stuff like “strong” or “splint” at the beginning of a word, but you can also do a word like “tents” where the N and then T, okay, we’re at the bottom of the mountain and like, where the heck did this S come from? Why are you here? It’s this really interesting sound that you can do all sorts of stuff with. But the neat thing about talking about S in terms of sonority even though S kind of breaks sonority is that it has this exceptional behaviour in several languages – in a variety of languages that aren’t necessarily related to each other in that sort of way. Not all of them. In some languages, S is a well-behaved citizen and isn’t exceptional. In Latin, for example, S also has this exceptional behaviour. You have a Latin word like “scola.” And then in many of the Romance languages that descended from Latin – but not Italian – many of the other Romance languages, Spanish and French and so on, they were like, “No, we don’t wanna start treating S as exceptional. We’re gonna put it back on its best behaviour, and we’re gonna introduce a vowel to grab onto the S instead so that it’s not being an exception.” That’s why you get words like “escuela” where that S belongs to the vowel before it. You can see this question of like, “Does this language make an exception for S or not,” is relevant across languages. It’s an interesting parameter that languages can vary on – even related languages.

Lauren: I like how much sonority is providing motivation for quite a few of the examples we talked about in our syllables episode because it is one of those things that once you begin to see it pop it, it explains or it hangs out in the space of a lot of the ordering phenomena that we looked at for that episode.

Gretchen: It was an interesting challenge in the syllables episode to not talk about sonority because we thought, okay, we should introduce one thing at a time. But also sonority is intimately tied up with how do we make syllables and what does a particular language think of as a syllable and not a syllable. In English, one thing that’s the case is when you’re climbing up the sonority mountain, think of it like a video game, and you have a certain number of slots to hold things in, but you need to wait a bit before you pick up something new because you don’t just get to keep picking up everything all the way even though it’s all on the way. If you pick up, let’s say, a P, you can’t also pick up a T at the same time while you’re down there. English is like, “Naw uh, we don’t have any more slots until we get a bit further up.” But in Greek, you can pick up a P and a T at the same time because it’s got a different video game metaphor holding system – not that the language thinks of it that way, but you know.

Lauren: It’s operating with different constraints, absolutely.

Gretchen: It’s operating with different constraints. In Greek, you get words like “pter,” which refers to a wing – it’s a root that means “wing” – which shows up in words like “helicopter” – “helico-pter.” In Greek, “pter” is a totally good beginning of a syllable. You see it in words like “PUH-terodactyl,” which English speakers don’t pronounce that way because English doesn’t let you do that. Or “PUH-tolemy” which, again, English speakers don’t pronounce that way – /tɑləmi/ or /tɛɹədæktl̩/. Some languages will let you say, “Okay, well, yeah, you can pick up several things at the same spot.” And other languages will say, “No, you have to wait a bit and wait till you get a couple more steps up before you can pick up something new.” Russian lets you pick up things that are a little bit closer to each other. You can have a word that begins with /ks/ in Russian or /vl/. V-L is a really interesting one because there’re kinda sorta some English words that begin with V-L, but it’s just not very common, and English speakers don’t always really like it. You have “vlog,” but a lot of English speakers would pronounce that a little bit closer to “blog” or like /vəlɑg/.

Lauren: /vəlɑg/

Gretchen: And you can have /fl/ like “fly,” “flea,” “flim-flam.” You got lots of /fl/s in English. /vl/ is just a little bit like you can kinda do it, but you can’t quite put your finger on why it doesn’t feel very common.

Lauren: If I had a crossword puzzle that was “blank L blank blank,” I would not be reaching for a V at the start of that word. Straight up. Absolutely.

Gretchen: No, it would not be what you’d be inclined to go for. You sometimes see English speakers pronouncing “vlog” like /vəlɑg/ just to make it a little bit easier. Or with Russian names like “Vlad,” saying it /vəlæd/ just to make it a little bit easier to do that. Because that one’s like it’s kind of there. In English it’s a little bit marginal – similar to “bnick” where you can kind of do it in English, but it’s a little bit difficult for you because it’s not something that the language does a lot.

Lauren: I would uncharitably suggest that part of the reason we don’t talk about vlogs anymore is because they feel awkward to say as English speakers. That’s why we talk about “YouTube channels.”

Gretchen: I think it might be.

Lauren: I really didn’t think far ahead with my “bnick” vlog.

Gretchen: You’re gonna be a “bnick” blogger?

Lauren: Really just making it not entirely wrong but slightly awkward for English speakers.

Gretchen: I mean, I will say that we have a pretty phonotactically weird cluster in the name of our podcast.

Lauren: This is true.

Gretchen: We’re finally admitting it four years in – like, /lɪŋ/ /θʊziæzm̩/. They belong to different syllables, but they’re just done with such distinct places in the mouth that people have a really hard time saying our name. We didn’t think that through.

Lauren: Different places and different manners. There’s a little bit of stuff that I’ve read about the influence of sonority preferences across syllables. We meet the requirement. Normally you have something that’s more sonorous at the end of the first syllable than at the beginning of the second syllable. We got that bit good.

Gretchen: Okay. So, we’ve got /ŋ/ at the first syllable and then /θ/ at the next one, but they’re just one away from each other kind of. They’re not that far.

Lauren: On the topic of names in the show, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Well, it’s interesting – and I can also sometimes tell when people have said the name “Gretchen” a lot because, for me, I tend to reduce that final E-N to just /n/ – /gɹɛt͡ʃn̩/. People who aren’t as familiar with the name will tend to give it a full vowel – /gɹɛt͡ʃɛn/. It’s not that one of them is wrong because English has this interesting continuum where sometimes we produce syllables that just have a sonorant like M or N or L or R by itself as if it’s the only thing in that syllable or as if it’s the centre of that syllable – the nucleus of that syllable – instead of there actually being a vowel there. You just say, “Here’s a syllable that’s just consonant centric.”

Lauren: Even though vowels are at the top of our sonority mountain, and you usually expect to find a vowel hanging out in the middle of any syllable party, it’s not always the case. We can have one of our other sonorant sounds being the “syllable boss.” Is that out official terminology?

Gretchen: If you have words like /bʔn̩/, /bɑtl̩/, /pɹɪzm̩/, even /rɪðm̩/, where is the vowel? No? Okay, no vowel. Okay, fine. Sure. Sometimes you don’t go all the way up the mountain, you just got up to a certain point, and you’re like, “Yeah, that’s fine. I’m gonna go back down.”

Lauren: It’s interesting that some like /bʌtən/, when I pronounce them with clear, full articulation, I put a vowel there. But I’m pretty sure that if I was just –

Gretchen: /bʌtɑn/.

Lauren: /bʌtn̩/, /bʌtɪn/? But if I was just talking about how I had to press all these /bʔn̩z/ really quickly – there you go. If I force myself into unmonitored speech, I’d just pronounce it as an /n̩/ syllable – or a “syllabic nasal.” It’s interesting how for some of them we only do it as a reduction thing, but then for /pɹɪzm̩/, I don’t think – there might be a tiny vowel-ish thing there.

Gretchen: If you’re really trying to spell it out, like “Go get the /pɹɪzɪm/,” you could maybe put a vowel there. But I think it would really sound like you were hyper articulating that. Whereas /bɑtəl/, you could say it with a full vowel there, and it would be fine.

Lauren: In English, they have this semi-autonomous sonorant non-vowel syllable status, but it’s not necessarily the case for all languages. There are some languages where you do get these vowelless syllables fairly frequently and centrally.

Gretchen: It kind of makes you want to check in on English in 500 years, which obviously we are all gonna be around for, because maybe by that point this casual speech/unmonitored speech/rapid speech pronunciation will just be how it is, and English will have this full featured set of like, “Oh, yeah, these are just our syllabic consonants that – nobody ever says /bʌtən/. That sounds so weird. Everyone says /bʔn̩/ all the time.” Because that’s how language change happens, right. There’re are some languages that don’t have syllabic consonants at all, and there’re some languages that do a whole lot more with syllabic consonants. Two famous languages when it comes to syllables without vowels in them – both of them are languages that have been known by multiple names in their history. One of them is a language that has been known as “Berber.” Speakers aren’t particularly fond of that name anymore. There are several different dialects or varieties, and there are different names for different varieties of those. It still sometimes shows up in the literature as like, “Oh, Berber has vowelless syllables,” and I’m not sure which of all these varieties – if they all have syllables that don’t have vowels in them or entire words that don’t have vowels, or if there’re some that do and some that don’t. That’s something that’s been left unclear by the change in naming convention through the literature.

Lauren: Interesting. I have heard people talk about “Berber,” and it is good to know I have to mentally update my name for that language.

Gretchen: Tashlhiyt is the variety of Berber that’s been talked about most in terms of having vowelless syllables. I knew some Amazigh speakers once, and I don’t know if they had vowelless syllables as well because I didn’t know them that well. But they definitely prefer to be called “Amazigh” rather than “Berber.” It’s an interesting, not knowing much about the typology of this language family, whether this is something that’s true of the whole macro group of languages or just of Tashlhiyt. I’m honestly not sure.

Lauren: These languages are spoken in Morocco and that part of the Northern African region.

Gretchen: And then in another part of the world, another language that’s often cited as a language that has syllables without vowels at all or words without vowels is Nuxalk, which is a Salishan language spoken in British Columbia in Canada. So, obviously very different parts of the world. I think several of the Salishan languages may also have not a lot of vowels going on, but the one that I’ve heard being cited is called Nuxalk. It’s in some older literature as “Bella Coola,” but speakers prefer “Nuxalk.”

Lauren: Cool. So, it’s not just a thing that pops up in edge cases but is a central feature of how these languages make syllables.

Gretchen: Yeah. And they do have some vowels elsewhere. The words that tend to get attention are the ones that have lots of consonants. There’s one very famous example from Nuxalk which is translated, “Then he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant.” This is a language where you can make what would be a full sentence in some languages you can make into a single word. I’m definitely not gonna do this justice, so we can link to that and maybe hopefully find an audio clip where someone has actually pronounced it properly. It’s got over a dozen sounds in it. When you’re talking about theories of syllabification, it’s not just, “Okay, it’s got the syllabic /n/ or syllabic /l/,” which is somewhat straightforward, but they also make syllables around sounds like /s/ or /ʃ/ or other types of fricative based sounds where you have, okay, this could also be the centre of a syllable. You’re really not going very far up the sonority mountain at all.

Lauren: One of those really wonderful examples of crafting a slightly absurd sentence for the most linguistically rewarding possible outcome, in this case.

Gretchen: That’s definitely what the bunchberry plant example is, yes. When I first encountered this in grad school this like, “Oh, you can make syllables that’re based around things that aren’t vowels and things that aren’t even necessarily sonorants,” it was kind of hard for me to wrap my head around, but then I was also thinking about, well, we have semi-words or fixed interjections like “Psst” and “Shhh” and stuff like that in English where you do end up producing what you would write as P-S-S-T or S-H-H-H or something like that. You’re write that without any vowels, and you’d say it without any vowels, it’s just that we don’t build other syllables and other words around it. In terms of actually producing it, it’s not particularly difficult. Any English speaker is able to produce things along those lines. It’s an interesting example of how something can be presented in a way that makes it exotified and then also has this very hum drum local existence that isn’t necessarily brought out when you first get exposed to an example like that.

Lauren: Sonority doesn’t just pop up while we’re talking about the structure of syllables. I also ran into our old friend sonority while analysing the way that tone is done in Yolmo. Like many other languages in the world, the difference between some words is a difference in the tone of the word. A word with high tone like /tó/ or a low tone like /tò/. They have the same consonant and the same vowel. They only differ by tone. /tó/ is “rice” and /tò/ is “stone.” Obviously, even for someone who is not always good at producing tone, like me, people generally knew if I wanted to eat more rice and didn’t try and give me stones because people are very accommodating.

Gretchen: They were nice, yeah.

Lauren: But not all of the sounds in the language have high and low tones. Some only have high and some only have low. The ones that do have both are those that begin with – or are only vowels or laterals or rhotics or nasals and also our fricative S. So, almost everything that has high and low tone are relatively high up the sonority mountain. Of course, from then on it all gets a bit messier. You also get /k/ and /tɕ/ in there as well. Then you only get low tone on your voiced /z/ and /g/ and /dʑ/ and high on your very aspirate /kʰ/ and /tɕʰ/ and /l̥/. But overall, friend sonority just kind of pops by and says hello.

Gretchen: The stuff that’s more sonorous has more tone options, and for the stuff that’s less sonorous, it’s either one or the other – as a very broad generalisation of how you split off that one or the other.

Lauren: Depends on some other factors, yeah.

Gretchen: But sonority is a piece of that puzzle?

Lauren: Yeah. The tone system came out of some older consonant clusters. Like English has lots of cluster-y sounds. You get fewer of those in these Tibetan languages as they’re spoken today. That’s what the tone system came out of. It could just be a bit of a coincidence that this reduction in the consonant clusters and the current sonority play out in the tone system. But I mean, this is the thing about sonority – it pops up and is part of the explanation of things, but then there’re lots of other historical or contextual factors in each specific language that also are in play.

Gretchen: Right! On the one hand, you wanna be like, “Look, sonority, its kind of fake because you have these languages with vowelless syllables and you have languages that don’t pay attention to it and do it in all sorts of different ways,” and then sometimes –

Lauren: And you have S in English.

Gretchen: And you have S in English, which is like, who knows. But then also sometimes it pops up in places where you weren’t expecting it, and you’re like, “Oh, this is actually a generalisation that actually helps with this particular bit of analysis. Ah! Maybe we still want to have sonority after all.”

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA socks, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet – now in paperback! Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can get access to 45 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fan and other rewards, as well as helping keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include pangrams, honorifics, and a behind-the-scenes episode on writing Crash Course Linguistics. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life, especially in this our anniversary month.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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theabandonmentissues · 3 years

Text

EPISODE ONE TRANSCRIPT

Warning: The following podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Trespassing is not only illegal, but often incredibly dangerous. The hosts do not condone any activities that could put their listeners in harms way, and encourage you to proceed with caution and do your research before exploring the unknown. We cannot be held liable for any accidents, injury, or hauntings that may occur. Listener discretion is advised.

(full transcript under the cut.)

E:Alright I think this is right.

Z: Is it?

E: Yeah, yeah that's right, okay.

Z: Beautiful.

E: Let me find this tweet. The first thing in my drafts, is (laughs)-

Z: I'm scared.

E: (laughs)...I remember typing this out at like 2 o'clock in the morning when I had to be up for work at five. I put, “I love not learning new pop culture terms. Love being blissfully unaware. I still am not sure what poggers means. I do not care. I am free.”

Z: (laughs)

E: And I was so tired I thought that was profound. Let's see.

Z: (continues laughing)

E & Z: (laugh)

Z: Damn. That's like our declaration of independence.

E: (laughs) I'm going to print that out on the wall.

Z: That's Gen Z's declaration.

E: Let's see, where is it? There's one about Jack Black being sexy.

Z: Yeah, and it's in the drafts, why?

E: (laughs) This one says, this one all it says, no capitalization, no punctuation is, “I want Ellen Ripley to knock me out cold.”

E: (laughs)

Z: (laughs)

E: And I live by that.

Z: That's your truth and you should speak it.

E: Okay, here it is. “Sometimes, facing your fears means letting out that earth-shattering fart in the public restroom, even if there are other occupants. Speak loud, even when your voice shakes, babes.”

Z: (laughs) Shut the fuck up.

E: (laughs)

Z: No!

E: Yeah, that one...uh, that one is in the drafts. Alright, well. You asked about an intro, and I had something that was work shopping.

Z: Oooooo...

E: Do you wanna hear it?

Z: Yes, please. Please, please.

E: Alright. Hello, welcome to The Abandonment Issues, a periodical podcast about the past, the paranormal, and the just plain perplexing. I'm your host, Em.

Z: And I'm Zack.

E: How'd you feel-

Z: The other host. (laughs)

E: How'd you feel about that alliteration?

Z: You know I love alliteration.

E: I do too, I got really excited about it.

Z: (laughs)

E: I was like dead asleep, well, I wasn't dead asleep. I was very close to being though.

Z: Right.

E: And I had that thought, and I was like “Fuck, I gotta wake up and type that.” So...

Z: It was worth it though.

E: Thank you.

Z: I like it.

E: I don't know if that'll stick, but I think-

Z: I don't know, it's a start

E: It's a good start. Yeah.

Z: Yeah. Well..

E: So.

Z: Howdy doody, how ya doing.

E: Oh god, well um, I just whacked my headphones against my mic and I think it's still vibrating. But otherwise, I'm doing great.

Z: (laughs) Well, that's good.

E: How ya been?

Z: I mean, I've been alright.

E: That's good.

Z: We haven't seen each other, I mean, we haven't like recorded-recorded in two weeks?

E: Yeah.

Z: It's been like two weeks, so.

E: Yeah, I think so.

Z: It's been a second, but yeah.

E: Oh?

Z: So.

E: This is our first official, like official recording, the other ones were just tests, so.

Z: So, it's a little different, yeah. Like Em said, we did a couple recordings, so we kind of like, dipped our toes in the water of what it's like to just get behind the mics and stuff, but again this is our first episode, and we kinda just wanted to, lean in and kind of explain why we are here.

E: Yeah.

Z: What we are going to be doing, things we are going to talk about et cetera, et cetera.

E: Yeah.

Z: So. Do you want to-let's start with the-we have a couple ice breaker questions.

E: I'm so excited.

Z: Because, okay, so, you have a college degree.

E: I do.

Z: I have college credits. So we both went to college. (laughs)

E: Yes.

Z: You know, it's fun to do the ice breaker questions when you start a class.

E: Yeah.

Z: Because, even if you don't pay attention to anything that anybody else says-

E: Someone is going to change something that changes your life.

Z: Every single time-

E: Especially, I'm sorry to interrupt.

Z: No, you're good.

E: But, especially if you are playing two truths and a lie. I have found that that is the ice breaker game that I come away changed forever, like I've learned some things about some people playing that game. Are you okay?

Z: There's a burp coming.

E: (laughs)

E: Just let 'er out.

Z: (burps) There it is. (laughs)

E: Wow, that was lovely.

Z: Not to derail, real quick, but-

E: Go for it.

Z: Have you ever used Bumble?

E: Very briefly.

Z: One of my favorite things about Bumble, is that you can do like questions or whatever-

E: And that's one of 'em.

Z: That's one of them! It really, it's really telling. And I love, cause one of my truths is always so bizarre. You know which one I am talking about, but no one ever goes for it.

E: I honestly can't-

Z: The car. *laughs*

E: Oh! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that one is pretty unbelievable. But-

Z: Yeah, we'll save that for another time.

E: I've seen that one, uh, I've seen the repercussions of that one in real time.

Z: Anyway.

Z: (laugh)

E: Alright, well...

Z: Episode one, we are going to expose my entire past.

E: Yeah.

Z: Okay, so. When we first kind of, started talking about the idea for this podcast, which really was just bred, I think just kind of like a joke text that I sent. Or that you sent.

E: I honestly don't even remember.

Z: It was, I mean just the, the very cliché, “We should start a podcast!” and then it just kind of went from there. Just I mean, 2020.

E: Yeah.

Z: It's nothing but boredom. When when we first started talking about, what we wanted to do with our podcast. It really just stemmed from, for me anyway, just really wanting to bring light to the history that exists here in the south.

E: Yeah we didn't really say that, we-

Z: No. (laughs)

E:...we are in the south, we are some good 'ol southern boys.

Z: Just a couple of southern boys.

E: Yea!

Z: We grew up very close to each other, as far as, location.

E: Yeah.

Z: And you know, our high schools probably taught around the same genre and path of like history.

E: Yeah.

Z: It's all white washed and gross. Bleh. But-

E: It's only getting worse, did you hear that Tennessee is like, passing laws to, how did they put it, it's so, it's such bullshit. Basically erasing any history of slavery or discrimination. I think that call it something like Radical Race Theory.

Z: Well, that's great. Welcome to our podcast where we are gonna nip all that in the butt.

E: Yeah.

Z: Because truly, like Em just stated, it's only getting worse, apparently. Jesus Christ, I hate Tennessee.

E: Yeah, I found out like a week ago.

E: Hi guys this is Em, I'm doing the editing, and I just wanted to clarify something really quick. When we were recording this episode, I misspoke and I said that this concept was called Radical Race Theory, but that is incorrect. The correct term is Critical Race Theory. So, I am sorry for that error. If you don't know what a ban like this would mean, the short version is basically, is that American lawmakers are trying to dictate and restrict what can and can't be taught in public schools about the history of systemic racism and slavery in the United States. I'm going to include some links in our resources for the episode where you can learn more about this and we really encourage you to check those out and do your research, because this is obviously an important part of American history for everyone. To erase these topics from lesson plans, really presents a biased and skewed version of events. Anyway, I'm sorry for that error and I hope you enjoy the rest of the episode .

Z: There's just so much history and just stories that are just passed down even by even just word of mouth-

E: Mmhmm

Z:...down here in the south. That literally no one knows about.

E: Yeah.

Z: I think that's, that really is what piqued our interest. When we were throwing around the idea of this podcast to begin with, it really was just like, “We're gonna find an abandoned building, we're going to dig into the research of it, and we're going to talk about this abandoned place.” And from what we are now, it's really expanded to literally just like a history lesson.

E: History, I think it's important to not only to cover the actual facts, but also, I think, not necessarily, like fiction and urban legends and that kind of thing. I think that sort of thing has a lot to do with like story telling, and the culture of the area like-

Z: Right.

E:..like there are, you know, you have things from like, the stories that your grandmother would tell you to keep you from being a little shit when you were a kid.

Z: (laughs)

E: Or, you know, why if there's like an anecdote for why is the sky blue, how did this mountain range be formed. Y'know I think stuff like that is really interesting. When you're driving along some random ass back road and you see an old house, and you think, “Huh, I wanna know the history of that place.” That is the kind of, the kind of thing, that I think really inspires me, is like. Seeing something, not knowing anything about it, wanting to learn about it.

Z: Exactly. And-

E: (laughs)

Z:...we had created like a little baby list of questions that we wanted to ask. When we first started kind of throwing around the idea of what we wanted to do. We kind of already covered a couple of them. But I guess I'll just kind of go down the list again.

E: Okay, sure.

Z: Just to kind of like, ya know, put the nail in the coffin, so to speak.

E: Yeah.

Z: So, the first question that we have, is who or what are our inspirations?

E: Okay.

Z: So I would say, for me personally, like I said, just growing up, and like I can't think of anything off the top of my head. But like growing up and learning that an event happened. Or someone did this thing and, you come to realize later on in life that what you were taught, wasn't necessarily the truth. The whole truth, anyway.

E: Yeah.

Z: So for me, I guess, it's not so much a who, as so much as a what. For me it's just really like uncovering what is real.

E: Okay, yeah.

Z: So.

E: I think, I think that's a good way to put it. And I feel like, y'know, disclaimer, we are not perfect, we are probably not always going to do perfect research. You know, we're not exposing all the facts, in their, 100% true form, 'cause you know. We're just taking the information that we can find and putting that to use. But I agree, I think that that's a big part of it for me is like. I can remember several times when I was younger, like having a teacher, do a lesson and be like, “Oh well this thing happened,” and then being like well, “Okay I want to know more about that but I don't know how.” And now, you know, I'm an adult, and I have better research skills, so.

Z: Right.

E: I think it's a far more entertaining use of my time, that what I was doing previously. Which was just, laying on the floor and looking at TikTok.

Z: Right. (laughs)

E: (laughs)

Z: TikTok truly, worms in my brain.

E: Yeah.

Z: But, it truly, this is just, even, I mean, we've been batting around the idea of this podcast for a couple months.

E: Mmhmm.

Z: And just getting started, and doing the research and like looking into these stories, has been so much fun.

E: Oh yeah.

Z: And, I know the story that you're going to cover today has been one.

E: Yes.

Z: And I know that I've heard bits and pieces throughout our friendship, pretty much.

E: Mmhmm.

Z: And we've known each other for awhile.

E: Mmhmm.

Z: So I'm excited to get, like the full, like get in there.

E: Yeah, I'm excited about yours too, because like,it-it's, I mean, I think, I feel like maybe comparatively I might know just a tiny bit more about yours than you might know about mine.

Z: Right.

E: Just because I've been to this location.

Z: Right.

E: And I've like snooped around there.

Z: Everyone has in this area.

E: Yeah.

Z: Well, goals for the podcast. Do you have any goals in mind?

E: I want a Lamborghini.

Z: I want to be Mr. Beast.

E: I thought you were *laughs* I thought you were gonna say Mr. Bean.

E&Z: *laugh*

E: Oh my god, which actually-

Z: That too.

E:...derailed, for a second, but this is relevant considering what I just said, um, did you know-do you listen...I know you like Gracie Helbig and Mamrie Hart.

Z: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

E: Do you listen to their podcast?

Z: Oh yeah.

E: Have you heard the one where they talk about how Mr. Bean has wrecked two McLarens?

Z: YES!

E: Apparently the man has like a 170 IQ and a passion, a deep burning passion for sports cars. And he has-I don't know if he has if he has wrecked two different ones or if it's the same one that he's wrecked twice. But he is currently trying to sell it for like 12 million dollars. And that, I have thought about that fact all fucking week. All week. They were talking about cars at work yesterday and I had to just like clench my fists and hold in the fact that I wanted to yell across the expo station, “MR. BEAN HAS WRECKED TWO MCLARENS!” Anyway.

Z: Truly it's a-

E: So sorry, but I had to get that off my chest

Z: Oh my god.

E: Rowan Atkincenter, what is his name? Ronan? Rowan Atkinson?

Z: Mr. Bean?

E: Yeah.

Z: I don't know his-the only thing I know about Mr. Bean is that he has wrecked two McLarens.

E&Z: *laughs*

E: Oh my god..

Z: Um, jesus. Goals for the podcast for me um. Yeah, a Lamborghini would be nice.

E: It would be nice, wouldn't it?

Z: No, truthfully, and I feel like I've said this like 50 times already. It's just getting the information out there. Letting people be in the know about what's going on in the south. Because I feel like *clears throat* excuse me. There's like this weird stigma against the south.

E: For sure.

Z: And it's just poor and dirty...

E: And ignorant.

Z: And ignorant. And like, there's so much that goes on down here that no one really knows about because it is so outside of “normal society?”

E: Yeah.

Z: I guess in other people's eyes? And that's even just like in the United States, even outside of the United States I'm sure that...The south is just like a cesspool of jokes.

E: Yeah.

Z: But-

E: Well I agree with that. I think that it's very much, uh there's a disconnect between like, people who actually live here and people that have never been here. And just like how it's, you know portrayed in the media. There's so. I think there's something like, I don't know the exact statistics, but I'm pretty sure that if you actually look at the numbers there is so much more diversity than in a good deal of the United States. Like, um I was reading something the other day that said that the south, like the American south is one of the most diverse places in terms of like LGBT folks and I'm not sure if that's true. But honestly, I would believe it. But yeah, I think that that's very much, getting the information out there, but also, it's a desire, personally, it's you know, a desire for more information in general.

Z: True.

E: Because-

Z: Yeah.

E: You know, I've lived here my whole life and I feel like I know a lot of cool little bits and pieces about stuff but you can always learn more.

Z: Oh yeah.

E: That is my motto.

Z: 100%.

E: You can always, always find something else out. Even if it's something that you think that you know everything about it, you can always dig deeper and find out more. So.

Z: 100%.

E: For sure, for sure.

Z: This next question is past exploration stories. I'm about to tell one of mine.

E: Okay.

Z: That's my whole story. So, do you have any that you would like to share?

E: Hm...

Z: I mean, I've done like geocaching, that sort of thing, but like.

E: Yeah,

Z: Other than that, like.

E: Yeah. I have been geocaching, I actually, I have been to the location you're going to cover today. And I thought I was going to get in big trouble, because the owner pulled up in his pickup truck and I was so afraid. I was there with my sister and, Vivian, I don't know if you'll hear this. But um, my friend Vivian, and we were walking around. We climbed the steps. We like went-I was too chicken shit to go all the way up to the top because it's a very tall structure and the stairs are very old. And I was like “nope, Imma go halfway but this step is broken, I'm not going any farther.” And then we came back down and this guy pulled up and I was like “Oh god, he's gonna get so mad at us.” He pulled up and we had Vivian's puppy with us and he rolled the window of his truck down, and he was like, “Can I give the dog a biscuit?!” And we were like, “Yes sir you can!” And he just stood there and talked to us for a little while, it was very cool.

Z: Yeah.

E: But yeah, I can't think of anything other than that, not offhand. I would like to make some more.

Z: Yeah. Same.

E: I have not been in an old building in a cool minute. Um, actually, I'm sorry, I did think of one.

Z: No, you're good.

E: Uh, we were walking around, I don't want to triangulate our location. *laughs*

Z: Right.

E: But we were, a couple of my friends and I, were walking around in this, kind of like, like uh small back road I guess you would say near one of their houses. And there was this old kind of a house? I don't know if it was actually a house at one point or if it was just like a shed. But we uh, hiked back a little off the road and went in there, and there was just like all these old bottles. Like, from the '50s all over the floor and that's something that I collect, and I was like “Oh shit, this is private property, I know we're probably trespassing. Imma take some of these bottles.” And I had a coat on with big pockets. So I put a couple of them in my pocket.

Z: *laughs*

E: And we hiked back out, and my mom called me, and I was probably like, I don't know sixteen, seventeen maybe?

Z: Sure.

E: She was like, “Hey where are you?” And I was like “We went for a walk, we're walking back to so and so's house.” and she was like “ Okay well, we'll meet you up there, I have something to give you,” and I was like “okay.” And when she pulled up I was like, “I have something to give YOU.” And she was like “What?” and I pulled out this crusty ass bottle of like vanilla extract from the 1960s, and was like, “Here ya go!” And my mom of course, I get that fascination from her, she also collects that stuff. So she was like, “Wow! This is so cool, where did you get it?” And I was like, “Well...-

Z: *laughs* That spooky building! As the thunder claps.

E:...we went in that spooky house.” And she was like, “Oh my god that's dangerous!!” And I was like, “Well, we already did it.”

Z: Yeah.

E: So yeah, that was fun. I love doing shit like that.

Z: God, me too. Is this trespassing? I love trespassing.

E: (laughs) I do, I do.

Z: Oh my god.

E: Yeah.

Z: Any topics that you wanna cover, discuss, why?

E: I think we both have a list of stuff that we would like to cover in the future.

Z: Right.

E: I will say, I don't want this to be like specifically true crime. Like I don't want to have all my stories be in one genre. I will say that some of them are paranormal related, some of them are true crime related, some of them are just general history.

Z: Same yeah.

E: I am always, I have very much a morbid curiosity.

Z: Same.

E: I will do my best to treat those with respect and there is one in particular that I am very interested to cover, because I have never heard of it, and it happened, like, in the town that I grew up in, which is very small.

Z: Right.

E: Not a whole lot of reported murders, but his name is Joe Shepherd and he was a killer in that area in the 70s I believe? And I was having a conversation with a friend of mine one day, when we were, like, first work shopping this. I don't think we'd even bought our mics yet-

Z: I don't think so either

E:...and we were talking about it, and she was just like, “Oh you know about Joe Shepherd right?” And I said, “No?” And she was like, “ Yeah, he murdered somebody and put her in the wood pile.” And I was like, “EXCUSE ME, how have I never heard this?!” So I uh, I have to, have to know more about that. I gotta know whats going on.

Z: Right. For me it's kind of in the same vein of, I mean my stories are kind of gonna be everywhere, but I'm really excited for my story for the next podcast that we're gonna do. Because it was right around the time where we started really figuring out what we wanted to do for sure with this podcast. And we went to just like a couple of used bookstores just to look for some, just some paper sources. And I found a book that was super cool, very interesting. Loved it, I've read it like twice already.

E: Oh really the whole thing?

Z: It's not very long, but I've read it like twice already, just reading through. The first story in that book is truly whacko-

E: Yeah?

Z:..so I'm going to cover that the next time we record

E: That's exciting.

Z: And I'm really excited for it. It's a missing persons. We won't say true crime, but I'll say it's a missing persons.

E: Yeah, 'cause we're not really sure if a crime was committed. Like I don't really know the whole story obviously but you've told me bits and pieces, and you know, there's several theories right? Of what actually happened?

Z: Oh yeah, I've got a couple theories that I have that I wanna, but we'll get to that.

E: We'll get to that next time.

Z: Alright, so full disclosure, this whole operation, it's just us, it's me and Em and Em and me. We do have an assistant.

E: Vanessa.

Z: Her name is Linda and we love her.

E: We love Tracy with all our hearts

Z: Veronica, she really gets it done. We asked our lovely assistant, Carly, to get some normal ice breaker questions outside of the podcast because it's really, like we said before it's really telling of someone's character to have these questions answered and we just told. We told Carol to go nuts, so.

E: I'm excited for this, because you've had a little bit of a look at these, I don't know anything.

Z: I've read like the first two, and was like okay, I can see the direction that Sharon's going. Okay, so you haven't looked at these, I've read a couple so I'm just gonna go for it.

E: Let's go.

Z: The first one is if you could be on any reality/game show what would you choose?

E: Wheel of Fortune.

Z: Wheel of Fortune?

E: I always loved Wheel of Fortune. Or Jeopardy. I'm not smart enough to be on Jeopardy, but I love Jeopardy. I miss Alex Trebek, rest in peace.

Z: Rest in peace.

E: That man, god fucking bless.

Z: God bless. For me, and you'll know this, here lately, I've been really into discord, like, essentially role play survivor games. They're so much fun. I've applied to play my first one, but they're so much fun to watch. So I would say maybe that, or if it had to be a game show, I'm going to go with either Press Your Luck-

E: Okay.

Z: Or Shop Till You Drop.

E: I don't know what either of those are

Z: Really? Press your-

E: What is press your luck?

Z: Press your luck is the no whammies, no whammies, that one?

E: I don't know what that is.

Z: You don't know that one? I will show you a clip of.

E: I feel like I've heard someone say that.

Z: So well, here's the tea, my grandma would wake up in the mornings and she would watch us before we went to school. She would wake up in the morning, she would make my grandpa food. She would sit her butt in her recliner and turn on game show network, until her husband came home from work, and then she would make him dinner and then she would watch more game shows until she went to bed. That's all this woman did.

E: I love that.

Z: So, this brain-

E: It's in your brain forever.

Z:..is a rolodex of game show trivia, but that one's a fun one. Shop Till You Drop was essentially, I don't know which one came first, but Supermarket Sweep.

E: Okay.

Z: Have you ever seen that?

E: Like guys grocery game?

Z: Kind of, but they don't like cook, so they'll have like a list, like you'll get carrots on aisle five, and tuna on aisle six, and baby formula on aisle 12, and they just, they go for it. And the first to do it wins or whatever.

E: That sounds like a lot of fun. I do love to grocery shop. I think that would be a fun one too.

Z: So number 2, if you could eliminate one food, so that no one ever ate it again, what would you pick to destroy?

E: My gut instinct says tomatoes, because I hate tomatoes.

Z: *whispers* Same.

E: But I do, it's only, like. I like tomato based sauces and I like tomato soup, so I feel like I would regret that choice.

Z: Ketchup.

E: I don't know if you're for or against ketchup.

Z: I like ketchup but I hate tomatoes. I was adding to tomatoes' cause.

E: Yeah. That's a tough one.

Z: I'm gonna go with green beans.

E: I don't think I can agree with you on that one, I'm sorry.

Z: That's fine, you're entitled to your opinion, but I'm destroying green beans.

E: Okay, okay, um, god, that's really hard. I don't, I don't like tomatoes at all. I hate touching them, I hate dealing with them. I work in food service. I could also say mushrooms 'cause I really hate mushrooms.

Z: I love mushrooms.

E: That is something I find so interesting about you.

Z: That I like mushrooms?

E: Yeah, you know. You're kind of a-I don't know much about. I don't know, you're-in my eyes you're kind of a picky eater. Cause you don't like, like lettuce.

Z: I don't like lettuce.

E: What about like a good arugula? Do you like arugula?

Z: What's arugula?

E: Okay, we're gonna get you some arugula. It's a leafy green. You'll probably like, well no okay. I should-I take that back. You like Spinach.

Z: I do like Spinach.

E: Okay.

Z: Baby kale.

E: Do you like kale?

Z: I like baby kale.

E: Oh, okay.

Z: I don't like that-

E: I don't know that I've ever had the baby-

Z: It's just like spinach.

E: I mean it's-okay. Yeah that's fair.

Z: But.

E: Yeah, I'm gonna hard answer, I'm gonna say mushrooms 'cause I really fucking hate mushrooms.

Z: Valid.

E: Alright question 3.

Z: What is your favorite restaurant? In parenthesis, Zack, you cannot say McDonald's.

E&Z: *laugh*

E: Oh.

Z: Well.

E: Oh, Clarice. She's roasting ya.

Z: She really is. Shoot. I'm just going to go with fast food because-

E: Okay.

Z: Restaurants can mean any-

E: Fast food/fast casual, I think that's good.

Z: Sure. Dang, I really like. Well fast casual, I'm going to say Chili's.

E: Ooh yes.

Z: That street corn, honey chipotle tenders.

E: Those honey chipotle tenders, if I ever get married, that's what I want at my wedding.

Z: Catered?

E: Yeah, catered.

Z: Remember when I went to a-if you're hearing this Morgan, I'm sorry, remember when I went to a wedding that was catered by Cracker Barrel?

E: Yes!

Z: Morgan, I love you but, a choice was made. Okay, favorite restaurant?

E: The first thing that popped into my head was Olive Garden.

Z: *gasps*

E: I unironically, unashamedly, unabashedly. I love Olive Garden. I am-

Z: I'm white.

E: Very. Yeah, I am-I think like I don't wanna go all 23 & me, given that I haven't even taken one of those fucking tests. As far ass my family has told me I am like an 8th or a 16th Sicilian or something, so that Italian blood, it makes be crave Olive Garden like nobody's business.

Z: The breadsticks.

E: I see like the sign in the sky and it's like a werewolf to a full moon. And I go crazy.

Z: *laughs* I love Olive Garden.

E: The tiramisu? The chicken gnocchi soup with breadsticks?

Z: Gnocchi!

E: The Tour of Italy? Ah.

Z: The five dollar, to go entrees? You have lunch tomorrow.

E: That is a brilliant business plan.

Z: True.

E: You know what I want? What I desperately desperately want one. The unlimited pasta pass. I have wanted one of those since the day. Justin McElroy did an unboxxing and he got one.

Z: Olive Garden.

E: I really wanted one ever since.

Z: *whispers* Same.

E: Olive Garden sponsor us?

Z: Please god, I know this is our first episode but please.

E: I had an idea for another sponsor. Oh, Subway! Subway should sponsor us.

Z: Truly.

E: I can't believe that neither of us said Subway, actually. We-fun little BTS, behind the scenes, not the K-Pop group, sorry.

Z: Why did my brain go there first?

E: We know why.

Z: Not today. That's a song.

E: LITERALLY every time we've gotten together to brainstorm, put together anything for this show, with the exception of maybe once or twice, that I can't even recall, it's subway every single time, so.

Z: We gotta eat fresh.

E: Somebody, at Subway headquarters, say, “Hey, sponsor The Abandonment Issues-”

Z: Sponsor these people.

E: Plead our case, please.

Z: Please, please, we'll send you merch if we ever

get any.

E: I'll figure it out. I'll use my art degree. Alright. Question four!

Z: If you could take a trip anywhere in the world, where would you go?

E: Hm.

Z: Forks, Washington.

E: Oh my god.

Z: Final answer.

E: Oh my god. That's a good one, shit.

Z: (laughs) 'Cause genuinely, I don't know 'cause there's so many places to go.

E: Yeah, yeah it's very hard. I always did-okay, well on the topic of my Italian heritage.

Z: Oh Jesus.

E: I was supposed to go to Italy my junior year of college and, the trip got canceled because we didn't have enough people to go. And I was very excited for it, and I would still really enjoy it. I would love to go make that trip, because we were going to stay at a farm in Tuscany that's been there for like, I don't even know. Since like 700 A.D. Or some shit.

Z: That is crazy.

E: It's called Spannocchia if you want to look it up. There's this incredible little-they have this website with like a video that you can check it out. You get to eat like all the food that they give you and all the wine that they have is like made on site. We were going-they have like the original wood kiln-

Z: Wow.

E:...on site, and you could make things in their ceramics studio and you fire it in the kiln at the end of the trip. But they also do like chefs and like butchers internships there where you can go over there and learn how to do things the way they do them and I think that's fascinating.

Z: That's really cool.

E: One day I would love to go there.

Z: Oh yeah, 100%.

Z: Get the swear jar ready.

E: Oh god.

Z: What game or movie universe would you most like to live in? Kingdom Hearts.

E: *Did you bring a roll of quarters?

Z: I'm just gonna leave it at that. Kingdom hearts.

E: I know you said game or movie-

Z: Book?

E:...but can I fudge it a little bit and say podcast?

Z: Sure!

E: I would love to be a citizen of the town of Nightvale. I know you don't know anything about Welcome to Nightvale, but boy lemme tell ya. I would live there in a heartbeat. I love it. It's so weird. I know that that's maybe not some people want because it's kind of fucked up. Bad things happen to people there all the time.

Z: Right.

E: But it's that cosmic horror, but in a fun lighthearted way.

Z: Right.

E: That's the best way I can explain it. I just love it so much. Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Kramer.

Z: God bless.

E: God bless you. You two really do some amazing work. I'm literally looking at a signed photograph of Symphony Sanders and Cecil Baldwin right now. They watch over our podcast. But yeah, I would love that. I think that the aesthetic is immaculate. There's deserts, there's glowing lights in the sky above the Arby's.

Z: There's an Arby's in this Universe?

E: Yes bitch! They're just regular people like you and me. There's literally, I wanna say in episode one, there's this beautiful passage where Cecil is like “Lights, blinking in the sky above the Arby's. Not the glowing sign of the Arby's, but something higher.

Z: Did I write this? Did I ghost write this?

E: You could have. I have all the books behind me, I'm very much a fan.

Z: If you could be any mythical creature, what would you be?

E: Hypogriff.

Z: That was a fast but good answer. I would probably be a gnome.

E: (laughs) Oh fuck! Yeah.

Z: I spend my entire life-

E: Yeah.

Z:..being 6 foot tall, I just wanna live a little down there.

E: That's a good one.

Z: Yeah. What small, insignificant thing gives you joy?

E: Thrift store knick knacks.

Z: Sure.

E: That's pretty much the biggest one. I go into Amvets like once a week. And I'll get-I don't have my Keith Urban mug in here. But I get so many tiny dingy things and they always bring me such joy. That tiny little frog that I got at the antique store the last time you and I went, that thing? I'm still riding the high.

Z: For me, I would say it's like when you, complete a book series, and you get that final one and you put it up on the shelf, and you see it on the shelf together. That's my-and it doesn't have to be like, for me it's like books, video games, manga, whatever.

E: Yeah.

Z: Just seeing it complete on the shelf just does it for me.

E: I love that. That's a very good feeling.

E: Yeah.

Z: What is the dumbest purchase you have ever made?

E: Oh Zack, oh Zack, this is a hard question, cause I really-

Z: I don't know! Because I make a lot of dumb purchases.

E: I know exactly what mine is, I'm afraid to say.

Z: Can you say it? What is it?

E: You know what it pertains to.

Z: Do I? Why are you blinking? You don't have to say it if you don't want to.

E: No, I'm gonna say it.

Z: Thank god.

E: So, what was the year? I wanna say 2011/2013.

Z: Uh-oh. I know where we're going!

E: God, I made you promise not to mention this, to not drag me about any of this but i'm going to go ahead and out myself in episode one.

Z: Oh no.

E: I was a backer of the-

Z: Ahaaahaahaaaaa!!!!

E: Stop screaming and just let me get the words out. I was a higher tier backer of the Homestuck Hiveswap Kickstarter in 2013. And that haunts me to this day. To this day I will never-I will never recover from the amount of money that I spent on that when I was god-I was not a legal adult. I spoke to my mother, and I said, “Listen, I need to get this money out of my savings and I need it now.” And she was like, “Are you sure you wanna do that?” and I said, “Yes please.” and then she let me do it. And I respect that she gave me that freedom but I wish that she had just told me no.

Z: That's fair.

E: It was not worth it, and the worst part. It's been like a long time. I still have not played that game.

Z: That's just how the cookie crumbles.

E: Yeah.

Z: Dumbest purchase, my mind just scrambled. Because me and Em just shared a very panicked glance at one another before this story was told and it just jumbled everything I had lined up. I make very-

E: I'm like sweaty.

Z: (laughs)

E: That really stressed me out that I had to admit that. Feel my hand.

Z: Oh, you're clammy!

E: I am disgusting right now.

Z: You're a whole seafood buffet with them clammy hands.

E: I am.

Z: Oh my god. What was the question? Dumbest purchase. I don't know man. I make a lot of dumb purchases. I'm probably, most recently, I'm going to say my book drug dealer.

E: Oh yeah.

Z: Robert. I feel, like I feel obligated at this point to meet up with this man to buy antique books and some of them aren't really the best.

E: But still it's a cool hook-up.

Z: Yeah, I buy them anyway. So, the last time I saw this man, I bought this falling apart copy of Orwell or something.

E: That's pretty dope though.

Z: I mean it's cool, it's got a bunch of his novels and shit. It was pretty cool, but it not in the condition that he said it was in.

E: Aw, that sad.

Z: It's fine. Sorry Robert if you are listening. I'm just going to say that because literally my coworkers put me on a Facebook Marketplace timeout, and I wasn't allowed to buy from Facebook Marketplace.

E: I didn't know about that, oh my god.

Z: They were like, you have to take off two weeks. And I was like, “Fine, that's fine, we get paid in two weeks it's fine.” So, I'm just gonna say that. (laughs)

E: Oh wow.

Z: Question number 9 is what is the longest you have gone without sleep and why? I know mine.

E: Oh man.

Z: I know mine.

E: I mean, the why really for me is-it's one of two answers. College or the pandemic. And I'm leaning more towards the pandemic because I was basically only sleeping like once every other night. Over when I got furloughed from my job last spring. I remember a couple of times I was like, “I'm gonna start a craft project!” and was just cracked out on Monster Energy at 6:00 in the morning, ironing patches onto a denim jacket and shaking my ass to Glass Animals. But yeah, I wanna say the longest amount of time was like three days, but I know you got me beat, I think.

Z: You know mine.

E: Do I?

Z: You know mine. When I was in high school and I watched Men in Black.

E: Yeahhhh.

Z: So I didn't watch Men in Black when I was a child. Probably watched the first one when I was in high school and then I watched the second one, and then there's that whole subplot that there's a universe wrapped around a cat's collar or whatever.

E: It's in his little tag.

Z: It sent me down a rabbit hole. I did not sleep for four days because I was deep in infinite space theory because I just drove myself crazy. Because I was like, “If a cat collar can hold a universe, what if we're the universe inside the cat collar? Which I feel like was the entire point. But it drove me up the walls. I couldn't sleep, I just stayed up for four days straight in front of my computer just googling infinite space theory, and learning more and digging into it, and then I crashed, obviously after four days, and I woke up and was like, “Never again.”

E: Well.

Z: So.

E: I bought a book not long ago, it's called Time Warps. And I opened it and the first two pages this guy starts talking about time travel and the secrets of the universe and everything and reincarnation and physics are all connected and that really reminded me of that. So, maybe I'll read you a little passage of that after this and see if it-

Z: I can't wait.

E:..jogs anything in your brain.

Z: I'll see ya next week and I will still be awake.

E: (laughs) Oh my god.

Z: Last question, who is the most intelligent

person you know?

E: Brownie.

Z: Where is he?

E: He just walked right behind you.

Z: Oh.

E: He's not a person. He's very smart.

Z: That's a tough question.

E: Yeah, that is a really tough question.

Z: I'm gonna say it's our assistant Becky.

E: Yeah, yeah. Trisha, she really, she's probably. What even is her IQ it's gotta be in the 170s?

Z: It's probably at least a thousand.

E: The smartest person that I know of is Mr. Bean. I genuinely can't believe he has an IQ that high. Not anything against that man, I don't know him personally, but the fact that that is the kind of movie that he makes.

Z: Oh my god, and apparently there's only like 12 episodes of that show.

E: 13 I think.

Z: Yeah, so he really stretched it out.

E: Yeah.

Z: I don't know. Welp.

E: Well yeah.

Z: Thank you to Veronica for all those icebreaker questions. Really eye opening.

E: It was great. You really did the damn thing.

Z: Well. I guess that now everyone knows our deepest darkest secrets since we exposed them in episode one, I guess we can kind of get into our topics a little bit?

E: Yeah.

Z: So I feel as if you're gonna go hard.

E: Perhaps, perhaps.

Z: So if you don't mind I'm gonna go first.

E: Okay.

Z: I'm not gonna go as hard as I could. With mine, mostly just because I wanna leave it open for a return, if I want to cover it again maybe later on. My first topic is going to be about the Roundhouse that exists in Tellico Plains, TN.

E: Nice.

Z: Fairly local, kind of close to us for the most part. Here's the issue with this, is that it was a silo for a local mining company and dating back to even before the civil war, this thing was operational. So there's a lot of stuff that has gone on-

E:Okay.

Z:...in this big old building. Another problem is that there's not a plot of information online.

E: Yeah, that was a problem I ran into mine too actually.

Z: Unfortunately, the person who posted this, the beginning of this is going to be a lot from Reddit.

E: Oh, okay.

Z: The person who posted this is a local urban explorer. I've seen some of their stuff, all of their stuff is really cool, their photographs are amazing. They do posts on Facebook and stuff here and there. All of their stuff is really well researched and really good, but I don't want to set a trend of making Reddit a, you know.

E: For sure, it's not like a primary source. So do you want to-did you make note of who that person was though.

Z: Yeah, the post that was made thearcherofred on Reddit. That is their username. When we post all of our sources I will give a link to this specific person I am talking about.

E: Excellant.

Z: Yeah, that's the problem I ran into and I guess that's probably why I didn't get as into it. Mostly because I wanted to leave it open so I could share a little bit about my own experience when I went.

E: Cool, okay.

Z: I am going to give a little bit of a backstory about the area, the place, what all happened. Like I said this was a post made by thearcherofred on Reddit, all one word. About 30 years after the Civil War, Southern Slate Works purchased the land where the Roundhouse exists now. This land before used the be part of the Tellico Iron Works Company. The Iron Works Company basically mined iron and other ores during the Civil War. It was demolished during the war, and really from what I can tell, nothing really happened in this area where the Roundhouse exists now up until it was purchased on December 7th of 1893.

E: Okay.

Z: In June of 1920, J.B. Preston bought 300 acres of land from another citizen of Tellico named Cyril Herford with the intent to mine the area. It is unknown if this was part of the Southern Slate Company or a solo kind of gig. Preston had plans of making a fully working mine complete with machinery, houses for the mine workers, storage facilities, and other stuff you'd need to run a mine. He also was-he was also given permission to construct a railroad system to the mine and the quarry was set to open on January 1st 1921. He then leased this area out to Tennessee Rocks Products Company and it was operational from 1921-1928. In '22 Cyril then sued the rock company because some of the debris had gotten into the creek that ran through his property and it polluted the water. There was another lawsuit that same year against the rock company. This lawsuit came from a local farmer named Henry Fritts. He was suing for very similar reasons as Herford, because the dust coming from the mines and quarry had killed crops and vegetation. That lawsuit was settled for 600-I'm assuming there's no information about the 1st lawsuit, because there was no information on this post about it. From what I can tell, nothing really happened after that, company shut down until 1928-er shut down in 1928, that is until the mid to late 50s.

E: Okay, that's kind of a long time.

Z: Yeah, it's a minute. At this point, a man named Dr. William Alfred Rogers purchased the property in the 50s, and he was a local practicing doctor. A little bit about Mr. Rogers, he was born in Violet, NC. During the late 50s he was one of 6 doctors that lived in the Tellico Plains area during that time. He had a small stone house, that stood in downtown but eventually he built a large three story home on Unicoi Mountain.

E: Oh, okay.

Z: He thought that the high altitude would help his more chronic patients, so that's why he wanted his house to be so far up in the mountains. Rodgers and his wife ran the practice out of their home for about six years before the couple had the idea of turning the silo into a hotel/Air BnB. Not Air BnB. Sorry, that's the Gen Z in me speaking. Just a B&B. Just a normal B&B.

E: A 1950s Air BnB.

Z: Beautiful, ahead of their time, truly.

E: You get a telegraph after and they're like, “How was your stay? Please rate us.”

Z: God. So he essentially divided the space inside the silo into multiple floors and created small apartment like rooms on each story. Supposedly, right when it was set to open, a fire marshal came to inspect it and it was deemed unsafe as there needed to be two clear exits from each room, but there was only one considering that it's a large tall vertical-

E: It's just a tube.

Z: It's literally, quite literally a tube. I will. I will post some pictures and some links to some pictures so you can kind of see. But truly, it's an old silo, it's a big stone, round silo. Cylinder, and on the outside there's a staircase that leads into the first floor but there's essentially just a round staircase that-

E: It's like a fire escape.

Z: It just wraps around the outside of it and that's how you would go up there and get into your little hotel room or whatever. The fire marshal said it was no good so they couldn't really open it as a hotel.

E: So did it ever have guests like that? Or did he just kind of kill that immediately?

Z: It's hard to really pin down what really happened after that. Some sites claim that Mr. Rogers and his moved into the Roundhouse after this and they continued the practice there. Other sites claim that they went back to the house at Unicoi and ran the practice out of it. I also read somewhere, and I couldn't really pin it down again, now that I started doing the research on it again but there were some rumors about someone running a restaurant out of it.

E: I think I've heard that one actually.

Z: And it was just on the first floor, it wasn't on any of the other floors, I think there's 5 stories in that thing. I couldn't really find that again, so I don't really have any information on it. The doctor passed away 10 years after this ordeal in '67, and it has just kinda sat dormant since then, aside from the possible restaurant owner being in there, but there's not really a whole lot to go off of on that route. Unfortunately as of now, the inside of the roundhouse has been completely destroyed by vandals. The walls are covered in graffiti and there was a house that was right next to it, and again, I can't really pinpoint what that was really for. I would assume that it was probably just another house that was-

E: Yeah, I heard from somewhere that that was something to do with the hotel aspect of it.

Z: Sure, I mean. I wouldn't doubt it, but that house is all but rotted to the ground. I've been inside, and the floor is rotted to the ground. There's no foundation, there was also a large fire that happened inside the roundhouse. Can't really pinpoint a date or time. Because it sat, it was just out in the middle of nowhere.

E: Not necessarily keeping track or reporting that to-

Z: Right.

E:...anyone.

Z: It basically made everything from the bottom floor to the top floor inaccessible. I've been on the top floor. Probably wasn't that smart of a move.

E: Prolly not.

Z: I was like 17, and you're invincible at 17, nothing matters. We went up there and just kind of hung around, and I'll talk about that in a second. But that basically made all the other floors inbetween inaccessible. That's really, literally all I could find online about it. I definitely have tried to join the local library to get some book sources or something about it, but I'm currently fighting with our local library. It's so shrouded in mystery that no one really knows what's going on in there. We've got a couple reports about the lawsuits and the early 20s. Nothing until the 50s, and then this random guy wants to build a hotel there, and someone says no and it just sits there again.

E: Do you know-I know when we first started doing the research, we were talking about how it was for sale. Do you know if it still is or did it get bought?

Z: I looked at it yesterday before I was putting the finishing touches on everything. It is currently off the market, it was not sold, but it is off the market. It was going for upwards of like $500,000.

E: I would love to buy it.

Z: Same I would also-Subway?!

E: Subway sponsor us!!

Z: Please.

E: Subway just buy us The Roundhouse.

Z: We will put a Subway in the bottom floor.

E: (laughs) Like the food court in a mall.

Z: Truly. That's all the information that I have on it.

E: Well tell us your story.

Z: Well, when I was like 17/18, I worked at a local grocery store and one of my cashiers, the current at the time, the caretaker now is a new guy, but at the time she was friends with-the caretaker was a family friend. And she basically reached out to him and was like, “Hey we wanna explore after work one night. Do you think it would be cool if we went up there?” And he was like, “Yeah, sure no problem, let me know and I'll leave the gate unlocked for you guys.”

E: Cool.

Z: We went up there after work and it was probably like 10/11 o'clock and we were just gonna check it out and then leave, but I was just very curious and very fascinated so we went into the first floor and I will try to dig up photos because I took photos. The test of time has not been kind to them-

E: Absolutely not.

Z:...with phones and just everything, I think they're on my twitter somewhere so I have to really dig and find them, but like I said, the first floor there was a fire. You can look up and see the damage has been done to this place. It's covered in graffiti. We kind of poked around a little bit, there's not really much to see. There's old appliances, wood here and there, debris, vandalism, that sort of thing. We found the beginning of the staircase that leads up around the side of the Roundhouse and we climbed up to inspect it, about halfway up, it's broken-

E: Yeah that was-

Z: Very teetery.

E: Yeah.

Z: Once you get over that step it's solid again, bolted into the side of that wall or whatever, and you just keep on trucking. We went up to the top and we sat down on the floor up there, we pulled out a Ouija board.

E: Oh my god Zack.

Z: (laughs) Not my finest moment.

E: (laughs)

Z: It wasn't even a good Ouija board, it was obviously, very much produced by Hasbro, and it had the glow in the dark light in it, to where if you pushed down on the planchette it would glow.

E: Oh my god.

Z: Obviously, we got nothing because nothing happened in that building.

E: I can't believe it.

Z: Then we went back down the stairs and then we went into the house that's next to it. Like I said, there was very few places where I was comfortable standing. Floors rotted, walls punched in, knocked in, burned. We were able to go up-there's an attic.

E: Oh really?

Z: Yeah, there's an attic in there. I wasn't able to go-I didn't go up in it because I didn't really trust it. I stood at the top of the staircase and peered in a took a picture or two.

E: Cool, I never knew that.

Z: Then, we discovered a basement.

E: Oh god! Under that same house?

Z: Yeah. Here's the deal. You didn't know this did you? About the basement?

E:About the basement, no.

Z: So there's a basement, and the stairs have rotted off, so you kinda had to hop in that hole and-

E: Love it.

Z: We got down there, and it was trash.

E: Yeah.

Z: Broken glass, beer bottles, cans, old screen doors, anything that you could think of, old appliances everything, underneath that house. Then I saw a little filter of light off in the distance, so I was like, I'm gonna go in that direction. There was a tunnel.

E: I know you were going to say a tunnel and I was so afraid.

Z: A tunnel that lead directly underneath the roundhouse.

E: Bro!

Z: It's crazy.

E: That's really cool. Very scary.

Z: Very scary. I was like, “This is some-,” have you every seen House of Wax?

E: No but I think I know what you're talking about.

Z: Very House of Wax. Secret-

E: Like trap doors and stuff.

Z: Was not a fan. So then after that we kinda booked it outta there. 'Cause I was like, “Who's idea was it, to build a tunnel-,” I don't even want to know. I'm sure there was a reason.

E: I wonder if was with the intent of it being a hotel, if it was a service hallway or something like that?

Z: I mean, has to be. Has to be. Otherwise-

E: It's the only non-creepy answer.

Z: It's what's gonna let me sleep at night.

E: Oof.

Z: After that we kinda hightailed it out. I have since reached out to that cashier, and obviously neither of us work there anymore. I've since reached out, and asked if she knew who the current caretaker was and unfortunately that caretaker had passed away. There's currently a new one.

E: I wonder if that was the guy I met that gave us a dog biscuit.

Z: Might've been if he was nice.

E: He was just a nice old man.

Z: I never met him, but I'm assuming if he let a group of teenagers go wild out at the Roundhouse he probably didn't care and was a nice guy.

E: That's sad.

Z: Like I said a minute ago, it's not on the market, but when it does come on the market, I will be very eager to see if it sells this time. Hopefully, to me.

E: Maybe by then we'll get some sponsorship cash.

Z: Olive Garden please.

E: Can I trade an unlimited pasta pass for this house?

Z: Truly.

E: It's worth it's weight in gold.

Z: Truly, 'cause you think about it. We go to Olive Garden three times a day, lunch, dinner, second dinner. We don't eat breakfast anymore.

E: Oh my god, well I don't eat breakfast to begin with. Who has time for that nonsense?

Z: I do, but only because I'm at work.

E: Eating a banana. You're being very healthy.

Z: I'm eating a banana, having a monster.

E: Alright, well.

Z: Well, that's it for the Roundhouse. Like I said, thearcherofred on Reddit, thank you so much for that post. They're a couple more that they have made about the Roundhouse. I've only used the one, so feel free to look into it yourself. I'll be posting a couple links to some pictures, and hopefully I will be able to find the pictures that I took when I went. We'll post all those.

E: Thank you very much for that story. Today-

Z: Please, go off.

E:...I'm very excited about this story, because this is a story that has fascinated me literally since my childhood. I remember my teacher telling me about it when I was in, I wanna say 5th grade. Then, it turned out that there was a book about this guy, and I had the book because it was my dad's copy, and that's actually the copy that I used today for all my research. I am about to tell you the story of Mason Kershaw Evans-

Z: Yeeesss!

E:...the Hermit of Chilhowee Mountain.

Z: Yes.

E: Basically, my sources-I did have a couple, just for a little bit of fleshing out about the area and a couple facts about the specific region, but everything about Mason himself came from the book. As I discovered, the man doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.

Z: Right.

E: Which isn't really that surprising to me. 'Cause the area that he was from was a very tiny place, it was in the early 19th century. There wasn't a whole lot.

Z: Right.

E: So, let's get into it! Our story takes place in the area surrounding Chilhowee Mountain, which is more commonly known today as Star Mountain, but it was named that because of a plantation owner named Caleb Star, who back in the day, he basically owned the entire mountain. Chilhowee Mountain is located partly in the southwest corner of Monroe County, TN and in Polk County. It is in the Cherokee National Forest. The flat, plateau like mountain is about halfway between Tellico Plains and Etowah and it's elevation ranges from 750 to 2,290 ft. This mountain was a favorite hunting ground for deer. So that's actually how it got it's name, because Chilhowee means cold deer in Cherokee. During the 19th century, this area was the home to Mason Evans. As I said before, it's kind of hard to find anything about him on the internet, he doesn't have a Wikipedia page, so everything I know about him I pulled from this book, Torment in the Knobs by R. Frank. McKinney. To quote the book, “This book was written give it's readers the highlights of the main events from the early advent of the early white settlers in the area during the early 20s, during the Hiwassee purchase of 1817, the removal of the Indians in 1838, the great American Conflict, The Civil War of the 60s, the building and operation the fabulous White Springs Hotel atop Star Mountain, the coming of the railroads into McMinn County, and many other events of that century. So it's not just about Mason's life, it kind of encapsulates basically everything that was going on in this area at the time. Because there was a lot of stuff going on, there was a lot of conflict, it was the time of the Civil War. It was a lot. It is a very interesting read, it's one of the more detailed accounts of this area, however, it's not without it's flaws. It was published in 1976. R. Frank McKinney was an old white man living in a very rural area of the south. He had some prejudices. I'm not really going to talk about that a whole lot, but if you do decide to-if this story does interest you and you do decide to get a copy of this book and read it, just go into it knowing that. There is also a lot of dramatization and speculation. That is explained by, another quote from the book that said, “Torment in the Knobs is a historical novel but throughout the author was at many times forced to draw his own conclusions to what was said in the conversations or dialogues between the people. This he believed was actually said, but not verified. The pages of the book are mostly written in the newspaper reporting style, but not all in together for into the phraseology of fiction writers. In many places, it combines the two. There would have been no need to write this book, Torment in the Knobs had there been a printed history of the east side of McMinn County and the lower regions of Monroe during the 19th century. What little had been printed in the newspapers and periodicals was wildly scattered and never compiled into a comprehensive history of the area. This book is not intended to be a history of either McMinn or Monroe counties, although the events mentioned took place in one or the other. The book was inspired by this pamphlet and was written in 1890 by W. F. McCarron, who was the founder and editor of The Athenian newspaper. The pamphlet was called-this is a hell of a title. I thought The Abandoment Issues was kind of a long name. This pamphlet was titled The Wild Man of Chilhowee: the True Story of Mason Evans the Hermit, 40 Years in the Wilderness, the Most Wonderful Creature of Modern Times Lives in a Cave in this County, Subsists on Raw Meats and Stolen Food. That's the whole ass title of a pamphlet.

Z: A pam-that's the whole pamphlet!

E: Yeah, literally. The book also says the great many people thought was a legend was unfolded as fact as 90 years later when a house in east Etowah was being raised to the ground. An 1890 issue of The Athenian was found in a chimney and brought to me, the author R. Frank Mckinney, who was then the editor of The Etowah Enterprise. Mickinney also did extensive research and interviews with local folks who's parents and grandparents has either met Mason, or had seen them visit their homesteads. Okay, so, there's this hermit..

Z: (laughs) I was waiting for it! Oh my god.

E: So there's this hermit..R. Frank Mckinney is the king of the fucking run-on sentence. This man could ramble. I think he's dead now? Probably. He had a lot to say, and not a whole lot of punctuation to put in it.

Z: He had a lot to say and no comma, period, comma splice was gonna get in his way.

E: Lots of question marks though. That is evidenced by his introduction to the story of what happened to Mason Evans. He said, “What happens to a man when his sweetheart suddenly jilts him? Does he take it in stride, or does his brain snap and he resort to unearthly things? What really did happen that day in 1848 in that little school house in Monroe County, TN, that caused a brilliant teacher to suddenly walk out of the school room, head to the mountains, never to say another intelligent word? And live there on snakes, rabbits, or other raw meat and whatever he could forage from mountaineers' chicken houses or gardens, and for forty years? Let's find out.

Z: Let's. Find. Out.

E: Mason was born May 10, 1824 in a log cabin at the base of the Chilhowee Mountain. At the time, the Chilhowee Mountain region was occupied primarily by the Cherokee Trible of the Native Americans. The capital of their nation, Chota, was only a few miles from the Evans's home. Mason's parents were names Robert, I'm sorry if I pronounce this wrong, I believe it's Hebrew. Her name is Karen-Happuch. That is K A R E N – H A P P U C H. I think Karen-Happuch.

Z: Okay.

E: I'm not sure though. They immigrated to Greene county in 1820, but they moved to Monroe after the Hiwassee purchase of 1817. The Evans' family was of Quaker faith, and their family consisted of Robert and Karen-Happuch, and their four boys and five girls: Moses, Robert, Mason, Samuel, Abigail, Sophia, Demaris, Caroline, and Octavia. Don't you just love that name? I love an Octavia.

Z: It's so out of left field though.

E: It is. I wonder-is that like a biblical name?

Z: I don't think so.

E: I've never thought of it as such but maybe it is.

Z: I don't think so, but go off, Imma google.

E: Mason was said to be the most talented of those children. I don't know how I'd feel about that as a Sophia or an Octavia in that family. Mason-that's kinda not fair, you don't get to be the best. Anyway, art seemed to come naturally to him. His penmanship was the talk of the settlement. Men in the region would commonly come to him to solve medical problems. In his youth, Mason was good friends with many of the Cherokee children of his age. He was 14 when the Native American Removal began, and it impacted him for the rest of his life. I mentioned Caleb Starr before, he's the one that lived on this mountain and basically gave it its current name. I had never heard anyone call it Chilhowee, fun fact, until recently. One of his son's named James was very active in Cherokee politics and he actually worked to negotiate the treaty that would result in the Trail of Tears.

Z: Ah.

E: Because of his native ancestry, eventually forced him and his own family to leave home and move westward, and he was accused-rightfully fucking so-of selling out the Natives to the white man. Eventually he was killed because of this. James, come the fuck on, what did you expect?

Z: Truly. Hello? Okay.

E: I don't want to make light of that obviously, because it was this horrible thing. At one point I had the numbers written down here, but I must have moved them. Thousands and thousands of people lost their lives on the Trail of Tears and this man basically was just-

Z: Didn't help!

E: Yeah, I don't know what he was-what he thought was going to happen. His whole family had to leave and give up their land. Hundreds of other families had to, too. Caleb Starr, as I said was a slave plantation owner and he had many 100 slaves. This is another really grim part of the story, because the way it is written, it kind of makes it sounds very praisy? They basically kind of put him on a pedestal a little bit, and they talk about about how-they talk about how much the people Caleb Starr literally bought and sold adored him and how much pride they took in their work they took for him. It is said when he left on the Trail of Tears some grieved themselves to death and were buried alongside the waters of Conasauga Creek. And that may have been true, they were grief stricken but it really grossed me out that a book written in like the 20th century was like, “Yes, this man was great, he owned 100s of people.”

Z: Yeah.

E: Anyways, but that's just-I only included that to highlight the way that it is kind of a biased telling of the story, but again it was pretty much the only source I had. Within a year the treaty was signed and the removal began in 1838. What at one time had been 50,000 square miles of native territory were reduced to only a few hundred. Until he saw them driven from their homes to an unwanted territory in the west, Mason Evans pleaded the case of the white settlers. After 1838, he formed a different opinion but kept it to himself, is what the book says.

Z: Okay.

E: I would imagine that was a pretty traumatic experience. Having all these friends and then seeing them be forced to move away.

Z: Right, yeah.

E: Anyways, so Mason went on to become a captain of a militia commissioned as such by the governor in 1841. He was 17 years old. Then, in his adulthood, instead of-I think he was supposed to go on to be a general or something. Initially thought he would have a career with the military, but he was so smart we would really rather you be a teacher, so he accepted a job as a teacher at a local school. Now we get into 'The Heartbreak' is what I have titled this chapter.

Z: Yay.

E: Essentially, the cause that is attributed to Mason deciding to go off into the wilderness forever is that he had his heart broken by his sweetheart. No one knows her true identity. What is known about her, is that she was the daughter of a prominent doctor in the area. “She was the apple of his eye, an only child whom he love more than life.No one would say, nor was it in print who the prominent doctor was, or what was his daughter's name. Was it because people wanted to protect the girl? Or was it because the doctor was so influential in Monroe County, that no one would even think to breathe a scandal such as the Mason Kershaw Evans affair.” It's all written very dramatically.

Z: Right.

E: Like a tabloid, but she was a co-teacher with Mason at the same school. They spent a lot of time together in the schoolhouse, but they would also go out together and roam around in the forest. They would ride their horses together. Mason would paint pictures for her, and draw for her. They just had a great time together. When he proposed to her, and she accepted. Mason didn't really wanna tell anybody, but she insisted that she had to tell her daughter, and he was like, “Okay, well, you tell your father, and I'll tell my mother and that'll be the only people that we tell.” Earlier, before we got started this was one of those where you could tell I was getting tired of their bullshit and just tired in general. Despite her anonymity, the author of the book gave her a name, that I quite honestly to be fucking hilarious. Dawn O'Day, and I put here, “Like bitch what is she, a leprechaun?”

E&Z: (laughs)

E: The whole that there was, there's this very dramatic story of her birth because Mason's mom a midwife, and though her father was a doctor, he decided it was bad luck to deliver your own baby, so he called for Mason's mother because she was an experienced midwife, and she was actually pregnant with Mason at the time. He and Dawn are only a few months apart in age, so she was born at the brink of day, and so the author was like, her name is Dawn O'Day.

Z: Oh-

E: Yeah

Z:...my god. What's his name again? The author?

E: R. Frank McKinney.

Z: R. Frankly, I don't like it.

E: (laughs) As I said, Mason's mother was the midwife who delivered his eventual sweetheart. What?

Z: Another thing.

E: What?

Z: I wouldn't care about bad luck. Well, I guess this was a different time period. But-

E: Yeah.

Z:...just, it's free. Just have the baby, you ain't gotta worry about it.

E: That's free real estate.

Z: That's free real estate, truly, but I mean, as soon as I said it, I was like “They didn't really have hospital bills.” But!

E: Well here's the thing that bothers me too about this whole debacle in the-I had a lot more of this whole birth scene when I initially was doing my notes because it was just. It's so hard to tell what of this was actually true, and what of it was speculation because everything seems like it was speculation the way that it was written.

Z: Right.

E: Basically there's this whole scene Dawn's mother is obviously in distress, she's in labor, she's in pain, and he just fucking backhands her and tells her to quiet down, and then she dies. Yeah, she fucking dies. She dies in childbirth. Okay first of all, he smacked the hell out of her, she falls back quote, “whimpering onto the pillow,” he drugs her to keep her calmer, and when she does deliver the baby, she dies. And he's like “Oh my god, my wife died, and I slapped her.” Like no shit. First, you shouldn't be slapping your wife in the first place, what the hell? That really-I'm sorry I just got real loud.

Z: No you're fine, speechless.

E: Oh, it frustrated the hell out of me. I could really go on about this book. He slaps the mother of his child, until she literally falls back on the bed, she dies, and that is part of why he was so protective of his daughter. Ironically, in turn, when Mason was born the doctor was the one that they called on to deliver him. This family structure, this community, they're all very tight nit, it's a very small place, they all know each other. As they got older, Dawn was very drawn to Mason because of his skills in the arts. She quickly became friends with him. She was allowed to spend some of her free time hanging out with Mason, but her father said, “Mason Evans is a bright chap, but I just don't have any use for soldiers.” It was speculated that he felt this way because he maybe had something in his past that made him kind of resent the military. A lot of people in this story in particular were draft dodgers for the Revolutionary War, which is a really weird thing to think about.

Z: 100%

E: I don't know why, I never really thought about the Revoutionary War having been-having had a draft. I guess that makes sense?

Z: Yeah.

E: It's possible that that's why he felt that way. He in general was very possessive and protective of his daughter. So she never really brought up the topic of her having any sort of affection for Mason until he proposed to her, and she said, “Well, I have to tell my dad.” She went home, and when she told him that she had intended to marry Mason, they had this massive argument and he forbade her to marry him. As incentive for her to not marry him, he promised her the farm and $1,000.00 in gold if she would turn Mason down. Now, I didn't google how much $1000.00 would have been in 1820 whatever, actually no that was later. I think this is like 1840. This is also one, in your story you had said there aren't a lot of really exact dates. There are very few exact dates in this too. Basically, I have his birth date and his death date and anything pertaining to the Civil War that was recorded by the government, but nothing specific in between. So, he promised her the farm and $1000.00 in gold, and he said, “Compare that to tending babies, scrubbing floors, tilling the ground, never having money of your own, your own husband being gone from home, soldiering, leaving you with all the chores to do. If you're in your right mind, you'll never do it.” And I have here, which, this guy was a raging shithead, but he did make some valid points. I would take that money.

Z: (whispers) Same. And a farm?!

E: A farm?! Yes.

Z: Cottagecore!

E: Yes, exactly.

Z: I don't mean to scream.

E: It's fine. That's how you feel about cottagecore.

Z: I love it, I love it.

E: Dawn didn't go to school the following morning. Mason received a note from her father's gardener, informing him that she would not be in school that day, and her students were to be sent home and return the day following. Mason accepted that, but he was acting very strangely after that. He was very anxious, and his students were taking notice. “At times he would lose his train of thought, stop his teaching, stare into space, and after a moment of silence, would again gain his pupils attention by frequently running his fingers through his hair, laughing foolishly, and whispering to himself.” Students feared that he had been bewitched because they had seen him act similarly at religious camp meetings, writhing, wringing his hands and crying. There's another quote here, “This was the first time anything had happened to him since the time he fell sick at his brother's home in Mississippi several years back.” He had gotten really ill. I don't think they ever said exactly what he had, but he had a very high fever. This is kind of where they think things started to really effect him, because he was kind of-It was a a high enough fever to where it was starting to effect his brain function, and they think that that may have permanently damaged his brain. His brother had actually said he had congestion of the brain, but Mason said, “But I wasn't crazy.” This is another-basically, any quote that I'm gonna say is certainly written by R. Frank McKinney, not by the actual people that said them. It says, “But I wasn't crazy, it was the high fever that caused me to go out of my mind,” he rationalized with himself. Mason had studied enough medicine to know something about fever. If he hadn't became a teacher, he would certainly have became a doctor, as he had said many times before. He wrote all of this behavior off of his anxiety and he told himself that he would see Dawn after class. The gardener came back, and brought him another note, telling him not to leave until Dawn showed up. Which I think is kind of funny, because why send this poor man to the schoolhouse, when you could have just said “She ain't coming to school today, also Mason, hang out for a little bit after.”

Z: Yeah.

E: Put it in the same note!

Z: Yeah.

E: I digress. So Dawn comes up, and they have this fight, she breaks it off with him. She basically does that whole thing of, even though she didn't actually hate him, she played it up like she really hated him, just to make it a cleaner break, which I get, I guess.

Z: Been there.

E: Yeah, it happens. Doesn't make it hurt any less, but that's what happened. He was devastated, and he got on his horse and he rode away into the forest to be alone. After that, he eventually went home, but Mason didn't come inside to get his food like he always did. His mom looked outside and she saw him run into the barn, grab a coat of a hook, and run back into the woods, leaving his horse behind. She said to his brother Milton, “Mason's gone off without his supper, wonder where he's headed for?” Milton replied, “To Panther Cave, I guess.” That's where he's gone a lot lately to write poetry and compose songs for that female school teacher. He said that Panther Cave is the quietest place in the Knobbs for when you wanna meditate.” Now what we'll learn here is that Mason is a douche. Oh, not Mason, sorry, Milton. Milton very much hated this girl. He, the whole time is portrayed as just thinking she has the worst of intentions. He literally calls her a witch at one point. That's another thing about this, all the exaggeration I've talked about before, instead of portraying as what I believe it to be, and what I think most people that would read this in modern times to believe, is that Mason was sick, he had some underlying illness and his behaviors after this point were possibly inflamed by trauma. To me it all reads as very much this man had undiagnosed mental illness in the 1840s. However, they demonize the shit out of Ms. Dawn O'Day.

Z: Great.

E: Constantly talking about Mason is wandering around in the woods just thinking about how he misses her, thinking about how she destroyed his life. Milton is constantly quoted as saying she ruined everything for him, and destroyed his future. It's fucked. Literally, all she did was break up with him.

Z: Right.

E: That really is another beef I have with this book. Panther Cave. Panther Cave is this cave on the western side of Chilhowee Mountain that was as the name implies known for being a hiding place for panthers and it became Mason's primary hide out in the years following this event. His family went looking for him there after he ran away, but they didn't find him because he had already left, and he was on his way back to the house. That evening, they heard someone in the barn and they thought that someone had broken in. When his father went in to investigate, he found Mason sitting on the floor in his horse's stall hugging his legs. Which, they say, this is a great horse, but I would not wanna be down there.

Z: No.

E: A horse could kill you straight up with one kick.

Z: Oh yeah.

E: Not the point.

Z: Mason's crying, he's sitting on the floor hugging his horses legs. He keeps repeating to his family, “I had to see my horse, I had to see my horse, he's the only one that would understand me.” And same, Mason I get it. Listen I understand you. I was a horse kid, okay? My mom still has horses. They're good animals. You still coulda got kicked in the head. His family convinced him to stay and have a meal with them. His mother told him to sit down at the table but he wouldn't. “Instead he began pacing the floor with bodily agitations and jerks. He ran his hands through his hair, jerking his head back and forth, then letting his body fall on the floor, writhing as if in extreme pain. Robert and Milton tried to get him off the floor but he fought them off. Finally, Mason righted himself, began to sing in words never heard before, singing most melodiously, not from the mouth or nose, but but entirely from the breast. I don't-that still boggles my mind, I have no idea. He would run from one end of the kitchen to the other and back again, often barking and grunting with each stroke of his head. His family basically thought what was happening to him was “a spell,” similar to behavior that they had seen people exhibit at Methodist camp meetings. Such as like speaking in tongues, that kinda thing. Mason was obviously in distress and they didn't know what to do. One of his parents said, “Mason's just like the man in the Bible that was possessed by demons, full of unclean spirits, until Jesus sent them into a heard of swine. But what could have caused such a thing? That was another point in which Milton was like, “It's all that woman's fault.” called her a witch. Like I said, they didn't have any idea what was happening because they had no understanding of mental illness or any kind of brain injury, knowledge or anything like that.

Z: Right.

E: So they just tried to make him comfortable and placate him. They finally fed him, and it said, “Mason ate his meal ravenously, with his hands rather than any other utensils. He ate everything they put in front of him and downed two quarts of coffee.” Which sounds like a great day. I would love for that to be me.

Z: Same.

E: I wanna do that.

Z: Same.

E: They tried to convince him to explain what had happened, but he jumped up from the table, grabbed a knapsack from a hook on the wall, and ran back into the woods. His brother Milton was a medical student and he insisted that one day he would become a doctor and he would fix Mason's problems. We're gonna time skip a little bit.

Z: Sure.

E: In July of 1850, there was a 10 day stretch of near constant rain. It brought widespread flooding to the region. Many people were forced out of their homes, and dead animals, human waste, and debris were washing up in massive quantities on the farmland. I feel like I should specify, in this area where this is all taking place. It's a lot of flood planes between mountains, so when it rains, even now, it's really easily flooded. Ten straight days of rain is bad. It was very bad. Mason, at this point, had been living in the wilderness about two years. His father had sold off his horse because Mason wasn't around to care for him. He gave him the money from the sale, he was paid $100.00, and he told Mason that he needed to take it and use it, but Mason didn't want it. He put it in his backpack, and just let this $100 bill get shredded up in his backpack.

Z: Mason.

E: Yeah. He didn't have any use for money, he was out in the woods-

Z: Fair.

E:...and at this point he had become an expert at chicken snatching, taking food from gardens in the middle of the night, anything that he could find, he could eat. He was an expert forager, he knew all the berries and roots and stuff he could eat. He did eat all his meat raw, but he didn't really have anything to cook with in a cave.

Z: You gotta do whatcha gotta do.

E: Yeah, although it's not like he didn't know how to light a fire, it's just he apparently didn't cook his food. That didn't kill him, so I guess it's okay. Disclaimer, if you're listening to this, and you're considering the Mason Evans Diet, don't.

Z: Don't.

E: Don't. Cook your chicken thoroughly. At this point, he'd lived out there for two years. Dogs would bark and chase him up trees and hunters had to come and call them off to rescue him, because they would tree him like a bear. Overall, he was adapting to his new life. He was learning how to function out in the wilderness, but things were about to take a turn because the Evans family was victim to a lot of the flooding damage. They lived right on the banks of the creek and they had to clean up a lot after the storms. By this point, all of Mason's siblings had grown up and moved away and gotten married, so his parents were all alone to deal with this. This is topical, unfortunately, the flooding brought with it something much worse than just property damage, it brought illness. There was an epidemic of typhoid fever, and people just started dropping like flies. Entire families were dead in days. Milton had gone to Knoxville to go to medical school. He was called home, not because they were enlisting all the doctors in the region to care for people, but because both of his parents died like (snaps fingers) immediately.

Z: Jesus.

E: It was horrible. He said, “I wonder how many people thought to boil the water before drinking it.” 'Cause they wouldn't have known.

Z: Right.

E: That was a lot of what was killing people was they were drinking unclean drinking water. The Evans family all came together to make arrangements for their parents, and the question came up, “What do we do about Mason?” Milton, always the spokesman of the group, decided he was going to track his brother down, but when he did find him, he decided to just yell at him. He told him that he was disgusting and that he looked like a wild animal, that he didn't look like a person at all anymore. He told him, “If you'll come and get cleaned up you can go with me, but not before. You can't see Ma and Pa looking like that.” He was just now finding out that his parents had died, he's already traumatized by a number of other things. Mason of course, didn't want to hear it and he ran off into the woods again. He didn't do what Milton told him to do, however he did attend their funeral. He followed the procession of, there was like a wagon with matching white horses that carried their caskets. It's described in this very beautiful and flowery way that honestly, genuinely very sad, and his parents were buried at Hickory Grove Cemetery, while Mason watched from the woods. After that, this is where things are getting up into the Civil War, because we are coming up on the 1860s. At this time, the construction was finishing up on the White Cliff Springs Hotel. It is a very important location in Mason's life, in his history. The owner, Harvey McGill, and instructed Jonas and Betsy Jefferson, the couple that ran the hotel kitchen, to attend to all of Mason's needs. They would feed him, and often, Mr. McGill would come to the kitchen while Mason was there and he would talk to him and kind of give him the scoop on what was going on. I also feel like I should mention at this point, Mason basically went non-verbal. He didn't really speak very much, if at all. At lot of time in the book they describe him as kind of communicating in grunts and hand gestures, but it wasn't that he didn't understand things that people were saying to him. A lot of things in the book kind of-at the same time they're like, “yes, he was brilliant,” there was kind of this air of, “well he didn't talk anymore so he was stupid.” I just want to say, that's not how it works.

Z: Right.

E: You can be nonverbal and understand things, you know.

Z: Yeah.

E: Anyway, that's a whole other spiel for another time. So he would come in, and he would get the hot goss, and he would find out what was going on. He basically learned, at the White Cliffs Hotel, that the war was coming. He learned all about states seceding from the Union and that sort of thing. He was like, “Well, I am of the age of the draft,” he would be draft-able, so he was like, “I gotta hide.” He hunkered down Panther Cave for a little while, a long time, several months I guess? While he was still in hiding there was an accident. He decided that he was afraid of being caught by the authorities, he wasn't even gonna go to the hotel, he was just kinda gonna stockpile supplies, stay in his cave. One night while he was out foraging, he sees this light in the sky. He followed it, and the hotel was on fire. Burning to the ground. He shows up, and the fire marshal is there, and they're like, “Well, there's your fire bug,” and they basically threatened to arrest him. He is very upset, he ends up-they describe him as kind of having a fit. He started convulsing, he was very upset, he didn't know how to communicate that he hadn't been the one to do it because people were basically just accusing him already.

Z: Right.

E: Fortunately, at the same time that this was happening, this woman came forward, and was like, “My daughter knocked a candle over into a laundry basket, and that's what happened.” He was exonerated and he got up and ran away. The hotel burned to the ground. Mason went back to Panther Cave. This is another one of those points in the story where the author speculates that Mason spent much of his time lost in the memory of his ill-fated love affair.

Z: I don't think so.

E: I have here, “Like come on bro, it wasn't that serious.” After that he visited his sister Demaris and her husband Horner Coltharp, and to his surprise, he learned that his brother, Milton, had become a doctor, like he said he would. Instead of doing anything to help Mason, he filed paperwork with the court system in Monroe County to declare Mason a lunatic and subject to the confinement of a lunatic asylum. Milton also sold the land that was willed to Mason, without his consent, and basically was like, “Okay cops, go get him. Lock him up.” Very helpful. So-

Z: I don't like Milton.

E:...yeah, Milton is a shithead!

Z: Truly.

E: Demaris and Horner explained to Mason that Milton had moved away, but he had alerted local authorities to be on the lookout for him. Demaris requested that her husband build a shelter for him, where he could be supervised and he could be safe. Horner Coltharp did what he was asked. He constructed an 8x10 shanty for him, supplied him with food. They implored him not to wander off. He did, of course, try to leave to go back to the forest, and he was captured and chained to the floor. Which was great, because when people heard about this, people would come and just stare at him like he was a fucking zoo animal.

Z: Great.

E: Yeah, but there is a silver lining to this because this group of women heard what was happening to him. They were sympathetic so they came to see him and they brought him some supplies. They asked him if he could make use of a file, and he was like, “Yes, fuck yes, I can use a file. I can get out of here if I have a file.” So they baked him a loaf of bread with a file hidden in it.

Z: (gasps)

E: He was able to eat the bread, get the file out, and escape. How cool is that?

Z: I love that.

E: I know! These vigilante southern mamas are just like, “Nah this is not okay, you can't be doing this. This is a grown man, let him live his life. Let him out, here's a file, go be free!” I have so much respect for that. That's probably my favorite part of this whole story.

Z: I love that.

E: Yeah, so he escaped and he basically-he vowed never to return to his sister's property again because even though they had tried to help him, he didn't wanna get captured again. He continued to wander. He did go back occasionally and visit the White Cliff Hotel because they were constructing a second one, or rebuilding it. But he felt really uncomfortable being around there. He set up a number of outposts throughout the knobs with supplies and shelters where he could hide, should the authorities come to hunt him down again. A lot of people had complained about him raiding their gardens, and stealing their animals. The police never really caught him. Four years passed from the night of the fire and Mason showed up and he was very surprised to find that there was another hermit living there. Well, he wasn't living there, but he was a visitor, and they were treating him the way they were treating Mason, where they would feed him and give him whatever he wanted. His name is Gabriel North, and he'd had a very hard life. He had been fending for himself since childhood due to a strained relationship with his family. The book also implied that he had some mental illness as well and that that might have been effecting the way that his family treated him, so he was on his own. He did, however, have two dogs and Mason did not like dogs. When Harvey McGill was like, “I don't want you two at my hotel at the same time, I think you both should leave, go show him Panther Cave.” Mason was like “Cool, let's go,” Gabriel was like, “Okay well here's my dogs, and the dogs immediately attacked him. Immediately attacked Mason. They get into a fight, he hits the dog, because the dog is trying to attack him, and Gabriel was like “If you ever hit my dog again, you'll regret it Mason.” He kind of explained, “I have a checkered past with dogs, they do not like me,” and Gabriel basically was like, “Okay, cool that's fine. Just don't do it again,” and they became friends. But, another epidemic of illness hit the region. Yellow fever this time, and Gabriel was like, “I don't wanna be around for that. I'm afraid, I don't wanna get sick, I'm leaving.” So he left, and Mason was left alone again. That was in 1878. At this point, the book talks about what Mason had done for companionship previously. Allegedly, he had a couple of different animals for companionship. He had a rooster that he stole from a farm, like a prize rooster. This rooster and him were like BFFs. He kept it in a hollow oak tree that he called his rooster house. It road in his pocket until the action of squeezing in and out of his pocket caused it to loose all it's feathers. So he had a naked chicken that-

Z: (laughs)

E:..that was his best friend.

Z: (still laughing) I love that.

E: I know!

Z: Oh my god!

E: He also befriended a very large yellow tomcat, which followed him around for a long period of time. Now, here's the thing that's kind of icky. The rooster eventually died, and Mason ate it. Which, yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say, I get it because he, you know. You gotta do what you gotta do to survive, and he was already catching and killing chickens before that.

Z: Sure.

E: The thing that bothers me about this, is that people were very into the speculation that he ate the cat too.

Z: I was afraid you were gonna say that.

E: I don't know that that happened. That's another thing that is in there just for shock value I think.

Z: I think so too. I feel like he was smart enough to know not to eat the cat.

E: I don't know, and honestly who the hell am I to judge him if he did.

Z: I've never had cat, who knows maybe it's good.

E: Living in a cave in the woods, you forage for all your food. Honor every part of them right.

Z: Yeah...

E: I know that's kind of fucked up to say about a cat but yeah. I just thought that that was-it was just randomly tossed in there between, “Here's a story of the Civil War,” “Mason Evans may have eaten his cat.” Like what??

Z: (laughs)

E: What are you talking about??

Z: Written. Like. A. Tabloid.

E: It must have been a slow news day.

Z: Truly.

E: Anyway, we're finally winding down. In the 1880s, a lot of things began to change. Lumber became a big industry in the Monroe County area, therefore, railroad started moving in. It was also at this time, that The Athenian, the newspaper that printed the pamphlet that I mentioned in the beginning, began it's operation. The publisher was a man named Wilbur F. McCarron. McCarron had promised the people of McMinn County “a newspaper of prestige, one whose literary content would be the best in the nation. There, the people who subscribed to the newspaper could be assured of many interesting features about McMinn, Meigs, and Monroe Counties.” The funny thing about this, is that people were not about this happening because they were like, “We wanna know about politics, we don't give a shit about whatever literature you're trying to bring us.” They also didn't like him because this was in the time period where Democrats and Republicans were flipped values wise-

Z: Right.

E:...and he was a Republican, and I thought it was really funny because they were like, “We don't like republicans around here.” And I was like “Boy you better fast forward 200 years.

Z: You better buckle up!

E: That's all we got. Within a month of the publication's beginning, McCarron came to visit the White Cliff Hotel and he told Mr. McGill that he wanted to know about Mason and eventually write a piece about him. Mr. McGill basically told him that the best person to talk to would be Horner Colthrop, his brother-in-law. When he returned to Athens, McCarron immediately published a series of articles in his paper about quote, “The Wild Man of the Chilhowee.” He recounted the stories of the people who had encountered him through direct interviews. The article stirred up a lot of controversy, and on January 9, 1886, ,the sheriff captured Mason and brought him to the Athens County Jail, and yet again, his capture drew in a lot of spectators. A lot of people came to watch them, arrest him basically and put him in prison. They took his photo on the steps of the courthouse, gave him a change of clothes and sentenced him to an insane asylum in Nashville. Very, for context, Monroe County is like the bottom eastern corner of Tennessee. Nashville is 4 hours away?

Z: Yeah, like three of four.

E: Three or four hours away, so that's very far from anything he's every known. In The Athenian, Mr. McCarron wrote, “Till a short time ago, Mason Evans kept with regularity the date of his birth, the day of the week, the month, and the year, and when urged to do so, would write a few sentences and solve problems with as much exactness as the days of yore. But age is creeping upon him. His eyesight is failing, and the little spark of passion and the reason that should have never left him is gradually being extinguished. It was only by the exercise of strategy and urgent persuasion he was induced without using force to come down from his mountain home and get into a wagon waiting to convey him into town, a distance of some 15-20 miles.” Mason did not want-whether they forced him or not, he did not want what they took him to do. He attempted to escape several times. So far as to get the start of his guards, several 100s of yards going at full speed toward the mountains. Mostly reports said that he was harmless, but a few people had said that in his older age he would get confused, he would lash out a little bit. What it actually said was, “attacks of raving lunacy.” Which, yikes. A few weeks later, McCarron wrote that Mason was taken the McMinn County Poorhouse. Once he arrived there, he very quickly made his escape. He walked a distance of around 20 miles back to his brother-in-law's house. Horner Colthrop provided him a shelter to stay in at night and he was free to roam during the day. Which is kind of what the situation was before, but this time there wasn't really much of an issue with it. He actually used the shelter he was given, the cops didn't try to come take him away, they all kind of came to an agreement. At this point, things were really, finally starting to calm down for him. During the winter of 1891-1892, Mason stayed in the cabin intermittently. He continued to visit the White Cliff kitchens and he was very grateful for the services that they gave him, because he was 68 years old, and his health was beginning to decline. Any food that they could give him, any warmth, he was grateful for. Unfortunately, on the morning of January 11, 1892, Mason's body was found frozen sitting under a tree. His brother-in-law claimed his remains, and Mason was buried in a simple wooden casket near his parents at Hickory Grove Cemetery. For 40 years, he had lived alone in the wilderness, kept himself alive. I think that that is fucking crazy.

Z: Truly.

E: Obviously, if you threw me out there now, given that I am of the-I'm on the millenial/gen z cusp. I've basically always had a cell phone in my hand. I would not last a day.

Z: I can't even poop in the woods.

E: Exactly! Thank you! I know it was a different time but wow. 40 years, completely alone.

Z: Yeah.

E: Didn't have a house, lived in a cave. Finally I have a quote here from Harvey McGill, the owner of the White Cliff Hotel who said, “Mason Evans is much better off dead than alive and Hickory Grove is a much better place than the shack he lived in. The final resting place of his soul is with God, I am sure.” That is-

Z: That's sweet.

E:...the story of Mason Evans.

Z: Oh my god. I am still shook about those women.

E: I know.

Z: The loaf of bread.

E: It's so cool. It's so cool.

Z: Oh my god.

E: That just goes to show you. That's the definition of southern hospitality.

Z: Truly.

E: Truly.

Z: Well, thank god I finally know all about Mason.

E: I'm sorry that was so long-

Z: Nah.

E:...for our first run, but I really just needed to

get that one off my chest. Fortunately, it had given me kind of a branching off of some other topics that I want to cover too. I definitely want to talk more about the White Cliff Hotel and I am actually planning on doing an episode on sinkholes.

Z:OOooo.

E: Caves and sinkholes are all kind of connected. So that's that. Thank you for listening.

Z: Of course.

E: What's your issue this week?

Z: My issue this week, and-okay there is a side of TikTok-

E: I'm afraid now.

Z:...currently, and again, brain worms. My issue this week is cleantok. Cleaning TikTok.

E: Ooo, that sounds nice.

Z: I'm gonna do a little bit of a trigger warning here-

E: Oh, okay.

Z:...for child abuse.

E: Okay...

Z: Because skip ahead like 2 minutes, if you don't want to hear about this, but-

E: I was not expecting this.

Z:...have you ever read the book A Child Called It?

E: No, but I know about it. I know like the general plot.

Z: There's a scene where household chemicals are mixed and it's supposed to be-

E: Oh.

Z: Okay.

E: Like the mustard gas?

Z: Yeah, pretty much.

E: I think I know where this is going.

Z: There's this side of TikTok now where people are like, “We're on cleantok, we're gonna clean.” and they'll dump half a container of AJAX, Clorox, Dawn, literally everything under the-

E: Ammonia.

Z: Ammonia, everything and that's just where my brain goes is mixing chemicals together and making deadly toxic gases and I'm just waiting, because there's livestreams of people that'll just go live and dump-

E: Yeah, I've seen a couple of those videos where people are just throwing in 4 different kinds of powder and dumping multiple liquids on top of it.

Z: Yeah!

E: How are you not dead? Someone's gonna get hurt.

Z: Truly, and that's where my brain went. I was like, someone is going to not realize it. 'Cause it's science, they're chemicals. You're mixing shit together, you don't know what you're mixing. Somethings going to happen, someone is going to get hurt, because these people on TikTok are like “Oh I'm going to make a rainbow in my toilet today.”

E: Can I say, I feel like a lot of that we don't have home-ec in schools anymore.

Z: Yeah.

E: Because I learned, my mom was the one that told me, don't mix ammonia and bleach cause you'll make mustard gas, but I don't know if that's actually true. I know that it makes something that is very dangerous, but that is kind of where you would learn about these household things. Schools are so underfunded that you don't have that anymore.

Z: Yep.

E: That's just sad.

Z: Well, that was my issue. Sorry to get a little dark there for a second but truly I saw just one video, and you know how TikTok is, they'll be one here or there, and it really made me mad.

E: Well, hey, PSA don't do that. Don't mix things.

Z: Please.

E: Do your research if you're going to use multiple chemicals because, because holy shit you could literally gas yourself to death.

Z: Here's the tea. One is enough.

E: Yeah, most of the time.

Z: Scrubbing bubbles? Fine.

E: Yeah.

Z: Dawn Dishwashing Liquid? Fine. Don't start mixing shit. You don't need to. That's what they're there for.

E: Yes, yes. Please be safe. Please don't get hurt.

Z: What's your issue now that I'm all worked up?

E: My issue, maybe this is dark, my issue is honestly that I had to take Brownie to the emergency vet.

Z: Yeah.

E: 'Cause that was a nightmare.

Z: Yeah.

E: I had to take my sweet little boy to the vet because I came home from work and he had poopied blood and I was terrified and I thought he was gonna die. It turns out that he just had a mild infection, and he's had his antibiotics. He's good to go now. We did his follow up, and the vet said he looked fine. His issue this week is probably the fact that they shaved that funky chunk out of the side of his neck, because they had to give him fluids, so he has this wonky ass-it looks like the state of South Carolina.

Z: Have you ever seen that episode of Bob's Burgers where he gets the stitch in his finger-

E: Yes!

Z:...and he's like, “Why did you shave my arm?”

E: That is exactly it, yeah. God that's such-I love Bob's Burgers.

Z: Same.

E: But yeah, that's my issue. He's fine. I'm still-I don't think I'm ever gonna recover from that. That was so stressful. He's okay and he's standing here staring at me because it's been two hours, and he probably needs to poop.

Z: He probably needs to poop.

(dog shaking his head noises)

E: Yeah.

Z: We'll take that as a yes.

E: Alright, well, thanks for listening.

Z: Of course, thanks for listening to me ramble, thanks for listening to Em ramble.

E: Thanks for really listening to me ramble.

E&Z: (laughs)

Z: Well we'll hopefully see you next time, hopefully we'll see you next time, I'm really excited for my topic next week.

Z: Hi guys.

E: Hey.

Z: How's it going? So when we initially recorded this episode, we didn't have all of our social media set up completely. There were a couple that had different usernames or whatever, just rookie mistakes that we had made, but we just wanted to rerecord the ending here. Kinda touch base with you, so you know exactly where to find us so there's no confusion, and we're all on the same page. So Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube @issues-podcast. Our Tumblr is @theabandonmentissues. Or you can simply go to our LinkTree whick is linktr.ee/issues_podcast. And all of this will be linked in the description below. But that's got all of our relevant links including our cited sourced, social media, and our Patreon can be found there as well.

E: We also have an email for listener story submissions now. So if you have any places nearby you that you think are relevant to the topics that we cover, we would like to hear from you. You can send those to us at [email protected], and we might read it out on the air.

Z: You never know what could happen.

E: You never know. You can also send whatever you want to that email. Anything you want us to know. Anything relevant.

Z: Send us memes. We'll print them out, and we'll hand them to Gertrude.

E: Exactly. Yeah.

Z: No problem.

E: That should pretty much cover everything, contact wise.

Z: We appreciate you guys understanding that we're fools.

E&Z: (laughs)

E: We're just some fresh faced youngsters.

Z: Listen, we're little rookies, we gotta figure it out as we go, and unfortunately this is one of them.

E: If you need anything from us, that's were you can find us.

Z: Please, send me memes.

E: (laughs) Please. It's what keeps him going.

Z: It's all I got left in this world.

E: Yeah.

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