Should we stop using "Bi-weekly"?

Transcript

Tom Pellereau:

Things that get very confusing in my world are calendar dates, because we deal with America and Asia quite regularly.

So when it's fifth of the third, is that in a few days' time, or is that May?

Jono Hey:

The meeting on Wednesday has been moved forward by two days.

When is the meeting?

Rob Bell:

This week, we've picked Jono's helpful sketch that explores the meaning of the word bi-weekly.

For that first week, we had a lot of vegetables to eat.

Jono Hey:

Did it mean it meant twice a week, then?

Rob Bell:

It meant twice a week, yeah.

Yeah, it was a good week for soup.

Jono Hey:

The typical Western way is that time is like this long timeline that's spread out in front of us.

There are some cultures where they say, well, you can see the past, but you can't see the future.

So for them, the future is stretching out behind them, but the past is in front of them.

Rob Bell:

Hello and welcome to Sketchplanations, the podcast.

When the 1029 train gets cancelled due to last minute industrial action and you've time to kill before you know there's a fast and furious scrap to be had to secure a seat on the now guaranteed to be rammed next service to King's Cross Station in London in just over an hour's time, there are three options.

Option one, sulk, bemoan the blooming railways in Britain and let this unfortunate situation ruin the rest of your day.

Option two, go for a lovely walk around the historic city of York in the north of England and soak up some cultural and architectural wonderment spanning the ages.

The Shambles, for example, is often referred to as the best preserved medieval street in Europe.

Or option three, find a cafe nearby, buy a coffee and settle in to start prepping the next episode of the podcast.

And so here we are, listeners, all of us, here now, a community brought together through adversity, stronger than ever, defiant in our resolve to make lemonade.

I'm Rob Bell, seasoned lemon picker, and joining me once again on our curious exploration of the world, always positive, always cheerful, our very own man from Del Monte, he who says yes to the best, it's Jono Hey, and perched up high in the trees on his continuous campaign of chaos, occasionally chucking fruit at passers-by.

He's charismatic, he's cheeky, he's a little monkey, all right, it's Tom Pellereau.

Hello, my friends.

Tom Pellereau:

How are you well?

Good evening.

Jono Hey:

I should get a hat like the man from Del Monte.

Rob Bell:

Ah, they were good at it, weren't they?

I've watched some of those back on YouTube, writing that, just for fun.

Just to see, because I got confused between the man who likes to say yes or the and the bank that likes to say yes, because that was like Midland Bank, wasn't it?

Jono Hey:

I don't know.

Was it the man from Del Monte likes to say yes or something?

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

And he'd go around.

Jono Hey:

He'd taste the juice.

Yeah.

Rob Bell:

He'd go off flying around in his cool little planes and helicopters and land in the most remote parts of the world where they're growing the fruit.

And I don't know if he ever actually said yes or if it was just a knowing nod.

Tom Pellereau:

It was very much a non-speaking role for the actor, wasn't it, probably?

Yeah.

Jono Hey:

All languages.

Rob Bell:

Which typically you don't get paid as much for, but, you know, they had to get him back each time.

He was the man from Del Monte.

How are you at dealing with delays to your journeys, boys?

That's that is genuinely what happened to me recently from in the right place.

Jono Hey:

I don't mind a delay feels a bit like it depends.

It depends what it all depends, doesn't it?

It all depends.

If you really want to get back, it's a pain.

But if you're a bit relaxed about when you get somewhere, I don't mind it feels a bit like bonus time.

Rob Bell:

But yeah, but a free time.

It depends on the length of the trip that you've got coming up maybe like the length of journey.

As you say, what's on the other end?

Are you on your own or have you got family or dependents around you as well?

Jono Hey:

Not long ago, I was in Minneapolis and my flight got completely cancelled and there was no way to get around and so I stayed the night and went to the largest mall in America by myself.

Rob Bell:

That's not bad, is it?

It was all right.

That's not a bad experience that you wouldn't have had.

Now you can say that I've been to the...

Was it the largest mall in America?

Jono Hey:

I think it's called the Mall of America, the Mall of America.

Rob Bell:

Yeah, great.

Would you say that's the best delay you've ever had?

Tom Pellereau:

I hope not.

Rob Bell:

It's hard to think, isn't it?

It's hard to think about the best...

Jono Hey:

It was pretty good because I couldn't go the normal route.

And so I had to go via Texas and dropped in on a good friend.

That was amazing.

Yeah, that probably was the best delay I've ever had.

Although once they offered us the money to fly the next day, you know, when they've overbooked a flight, yeah, and I'm never in a position to take it.

But once we were, we were like, actually, well, I would take it.

I could just take it.

Rob Bell:

Well, I got my money back for that journey at the weekend, and I was quite fine.

I mean, I did have to stand all the way home because, you know, if one train gets delayed, the next two, three are absolutely ramma, lamma, jam, dam.

Jono Hey:

Which journey at the weekend?

Rob Bell:

From York to London on the train.

I tell you what, I was quite, I was, I was left feeling quite, quite smug about the fact that I made good use of my time.

I had about an hour and 10 minutes because I'm not that good at squeezing in productivity into a short amount of time.

Despite having two very good friends who are very, very good at that, that influence hasn't rubbed off on me as much as I'd like.

I was referring to you two, by the way.

Tom Pellereau:

Thank you.

I see.

Well, so you, you said it.

So on, on the weekend, I was flying back from half term and our flight got delayed and a bit more delayed and I was just going through my emails from the week and I was kind of like, well, I'll just keep doing this till we take off and it just kept on being delayed.

And I was like, just going through more and more.

I was like, oh, it wasn't, you know, I wasn't expecting to get four, four hours worth of emails here when we arrived at the airport.

But by the time we took off and by the, and then I've worked on the plane, by the time it landed, it's like, oh, brilliant.

Well, that's, that's, that's done.

And as you say, they're traveling with family, I must say iPads and that kind of stuff have completely changed it.

Because if, when we were young, delayed for a plane, the kids have got nothing to do, they're running around a small airport causing chaos.

Our kids were just so happy because they downloaded some things on Netflix and they were just happily sitting there watching that.

It's like their best time ever.

Great.

Jono Hey:

I remember sleeping at a Greek airport as a kid and just doing like word searches and logic puzzles for hours and hours on the floor of a Greek airport.

But yeah, maybe I got quite good at word searches.

Rob Bell:

That was the iPad of its day.

Well, listen, there are no delays here.

This podcast service continues its 100% reliability record.

Was that one time I temporarily uploaded an episode with Jono's track muted?

And that time I forgot to hit record.

So let's call it an even 90% reliability record.

That's still not bad.

Right then, all aboard.

Let's podcast.

This week, we've picked Jono's helpful sketch that explores the meaning of the word biweekly and whether we should be using it at all, because there's definitely room for ambiguity here, the consequences of which could be huge, more small or somewhere in between.

You should be able to see this sketch on your podcast player screens now, but if not, you can find a direct link to it in the episode description down below.

You can also find our email address there to send us stories of your own experiences and thoughts about the topics we cover.

To save you time now though, Tom will tell you where to send your emails.

Tom Pellereau:

Hello at sketchplanations.com.

Rob Bell:

Thank you, Tom.

And thank you for all your messages from the last week.

We'll be going through a selection of those at the end of the podcast.

Now, before we get going in earnest on this week's sketch, I have an important announcement to make.

This week's sketch was chosen for a very good reason in that it helps us explain that from the next episode, we'll be releasing this podcast bi-weekly.

Now, to clarify that, I mean, we'll be releasing them once every two weeks or fortnightly.

Jono Hey:

Oh, dear.

I need to redo the sketch.

Rob Bell:

As a team, with all the stuff that we've got going on, we figured we'd be better placed to keep bringing you the quality of podcasts you deserve by reducing the frequency of publication for the short term, at least.

And when we talked about it, we listed at least 10 reasons why we think it's a better offering.

And I won't bore you with that list now, but suffice to say, in our current situation, and for the time being, we'll be publishing new podcast episodes every two weeks.

There, that's sorted.

Okay, on to the sketch, Jono.

Why did you want to make this clarification?

Was there something specific that happened to you that highlighted this discrepancy?

Jono Hey:

Yeah, this sketch is one of the things I like about actually doing Sketchplanations, because I feel like, I don't know, a lot of things feel like maybe they need to be big ideas for your career or make you look at something differently or whatever.

But sometimes it can just be a little thing that actually you might find that you use on a regular basis in the future.

And so you're just like, here's something that I actually find quite useful.

And I find myself telling people whether they keep listening, I don't know.

But...

Rob Bell:

Sketchplanations, the podcast.

We're here to help.

Jono Hey:

Yeah, so this came literally from writing and trying to explain in a very short space of time.

So I've worked in web design for a long time.

And so you're always trying to keep text as small and concise as possible because basically people don't read text if it's on a website.

But sometimes it's quite important.

And so when I was at a company called Nutmeg and we were just starting out, we actually, it was an investment company and when people paid money in to be invested, we would do it bi-weekly.

And it came back very clearly that people had different ideas of what our bi-weekly investing cycle meant.

And people were quite annoyed if they'd waited a week and it hadn't happened because we meant it was every two weeks instead of twice a week.

And it turns out if you go look up bi-weekly, it is actually in the definition that it can mean either of these two things.

And the same is true of bi-monthly and bi-annually.

I was actually on holiday one place and I had a bi-annual festival and it never specified whether that was twice a year or every two years.

I'm still not sure to this day.

Anyway, so we were writing this thing.

And then it was a chap we were working with called Ian Hollingshead and he was a writer himself.

And he said, why don't you use fortnightly?

It's a really nice word.

It gets rid of all the ambiguity of bi-weekly.

And I use fortnightly every time since.

He, by the way, has written some really nice books of their collections of people's letters to the Telegraph newspaper.

And they've got cool titles like Imagine My Surprise.

Am I Alone in Thinking?

Just as you might title these, they're quite funny, they're very funny books actually.

Anyway, so this tip is just as bi-weekly can actually mean twice a week or every two weeks.

But if you just use fortnightly, there's no ambiguity.

Rob Bell:

So I have an example also of when this didn't go as planned for me with vegetable delivery, vegetable delivery to the house.

So on the order form, there was a bi-weekly option.

And what we wanted was a delivery once every two weeks, which probably makes sense, there's only two of us in the house.

And I have to say, I admit, I did complete the form quite quickly without paying too much attention to the other options.

But for that first week, we had a lot of vegetables to eat.

Jono Hey:

Did it mean it meant twice a week?

Rob Bell:

It meant twice a week.

And I think if I paid more attention...

No, we sorted it out after two.

After two came within the same week, and we're expecting one, another two weeks, another one.

Jono Hey:

Did you send them the sketch?

Rob Bell:

No.

Jono Hey:

They need to know.

Rob Bell:

They need to know.

Jono Hey:

All these unhappy customers, terrible reviews.

Rob Bell:

I think if I'd paid a bit more attention, I would have seen that the options either side of it, maybe put it in context.

Jono Hey:

That's where I started.

People don't pay attention.

Rob Bell:

You're right.

Jono Hey:

I am people.

Tom Pellereau:

It's true.

Rob Bell:

I mean, yeah.

So what we wanted, what we wanted, actually, was something a bit more akin to bi-monthly.

Twice a month or roughly once every two weeks.

But then there's a risk of getting delivery once every two months.

Not enough veg.

So, you know, same, not enough, too much.

What we want is somewhere in between.

We want the mummy bear borage.

Tom Pellereau:

So technically bi-weekly and bi-monthly could mean the same.

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

Two different people could mean the same thing and use those two.

Jono Hey:

One call it bi-weekly, one call it bi-monthly.

You get the same amount of veg.

Rob Bell:

Do you see the problem, listeners?

Tom Pellereau:

And then hilariously, thinking the more you keep saying fortnightly, I know that my 12 year old would be like, oh, is that the game?

Does that mean I can play fortnight?

Jono Hey:

Yeah.

I searched.

I had not thought about it really for the etymology for it.

And all I could find was references to the game fortnight.

Rob Bell:

So if he said, I want to order my vegetables fortnightly, it means I have to go out and kill a hundred people.

Jono Hey:

Online multiplayer competition.

Rob Bell:

Yeah, for anybody who doesn't know, fortnight is a massive multiplayer online game.

It's survival of the fittest, survival of the winner.

Jono Hey:

Survival of the person who's played the most.

Rob Bell:

Yeah, probably.

Jono Hey:

It means 14 nights, by the way, which just seems completely obvious now that I looked it up.

Rob Bell:

What fortnightly?

Jono Hey:

It's like a contraction of 14 nightly.

Rob Bell:

There you go.

Oh, that's good.

I haven't put two and two together with that.

Jono Hey:

So I was trying to think if you were like, if you want to say twice a year, you'd need like a sixmas or something.

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

Jono Hey:

Every sixmas.

Yeah.

For six months.

Rob Bell:

Is mas month?

Jono Hey:

It isn't.

Tom Pellereau:

No.

Jono Hey:

Mase is month in Spanish.

It sort of sounds like it though, doesn't it?

Rob Bell:

We'll go.

We'll go sixmas.

Tom Pellereau:

Sixmas sounds very similar to Christmas twice a year.

Rob Bell:

A sixmously festival.

Tommy, have you had any examples of when you've come a cropper because of bi-weekly, bi-monthly, bi-annually?

Tom Pellereau:

Things that get very confusing in my world are calendar dates because we deal with America and Asia quite regularly.

So when it's kind of like fifth of the third, it's like, is that in a few days' time or is that May?

And so I'm always very clear to make sure it's like fifth-March or third-May because that causes chaos dates.

Rob Bell:

Absolutely.

And this is all in the same realm.

This is ambiguity around time, right?

How we're describing time.

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah, and information.

Rob Bell:

Where this took me when I was thinking and enjoying researching around this was around the ambiguity of language that we have as a kind of wider context.

And there's quite a bit.

And I've discovered that there are basically two types of ambiguity in language.

There's lexical ambiguity, which is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word, like with biweekly.

And there's syntactic ambiguity, which is the presence of two or more meanings within a single sentence or a sequence of words.

So tell me.

So the example of I saw her duck.

Did she duck?

Was she walking around with a duck?

That's lexical ambiguity, as you say.

And an example of syntactic ambiguity.

This one's been pointed out in William Empson's book, The 7 Types of Ambiguity from 1947.

And the phrase is, I can't tell you how much I enjoyed meeting your husband.

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed meeting your husband.

Tom Pellereau:

Oh, yeah, can't.

Rob Bell:

Two meanings?

I can't tell you.

Jono Hey:

I'm struggling with that.

Rob Bell:

What?

Jono Hey:

Just because, just because.

Rob Bell:

So you could take that as the way we probably all took it.

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed meeting you.

I really enjoyed you.

Well, I can't tell you how much I enjoyed meeting your husband.

Jono Hey:

You literally can't tell you.

Rob Bell:

Or maybe or I can't tell you.

Jono Hey:

Tell me not to tell you.

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

Jono Hey:

Don't tell my wife how much you enjoyed meeting me.

Rob Bell:

There's a slightly more fun one.

A quote from Rowan Atkinson.

And I presume is the introduction in a speech.

Rowan is a famous comedian, British comedian.

He's Mr.

Bean, for goodness sake.

So he says, as I was leaving this morning, I said to myself, the last thing you must do is forget your speech.

And sure enough, if I left the house this morning, the last thing I did was to forget my speech.

And I guess ambiguity of language is a great source of wordplay and a great source of comedy as well, Rowan.

Jono Hey:

When I sent out the Fortnightly one, a couple of people wrote to me about some research that I really like.

And I came across in the early 2000s by Lera Boroditsky.

I think I might have mentioned it before, but it's such a classic example here, which is this ambiguity in time.

And the classic example is if the meeting on Wednesday has been moved forward by two days, when is the meeting?

Rob Bell:

Oh, good.

It's been moved forward.

So there I would say the meeting would be on Monday.

Jono Hey:

Yeah, interesting.

And it's essentially it's split.

So some people will say the meeting is moved forward to Monday, and some people will think that it's now Friday.

Rob Bell:

Yeah, forward in time.

Jono Hey:

Exactly.

And so it's ambiguous.

And there's some really good fascinating things about how we see time.

So for example, the typical Western way of talking about time is that time is like this long timeline that spread out in front of us.

And so the future is ahead of us, we would say, and the past is behind us.

But that's not true for every culture.

And there are some cultures where they say, well, you can't see the past, but you can't see the future.

So for them, the future is stretching out behind them, but the past is in front of them because that's what they can see.

Rob Bell:

Fair enough.

It's logical.

It's logic to that.

Jono Hey:

Yeah.

And so it's just really fascinating ways that like, actually, we don't all see these things the same way.

Rob Bell:

I'm trying to get my head around that.

That takes quite a bit of conscious effort to think about the past in front of you and the future behind you.

I even had to think about saying that, as I said it.

Tom Pellereau:

You can.

Jono Hey:

Yeah.

It's a kind of crazy one.

And there was a great example also she talks about.

There's an Aboriginal tribe who don't have words.

They wouldn't use words for left and right.

And so they do everything by the cardinal directions, the compass directions, essentially.

So everything's north, south, east and west.

And so whichever way you're facing, you always know which is.

And so she gives an example.

You'd literally say, oh, look, there's an ant on your southwest leg.

Or can you pass me the salt on your north, north, east?

Rob Bell:

But does that mean that you're constantly aware of where north, south, east and west is?

Yes.

Tom Pellereau:

From the sun, I suppose.

Jono Hey:

So they're always paying attention, whichever way they're facing.

And apparently the way you greet each other there is you say hello and you say which direction you're heading in.

That's kind of how you say hello.

And for them, time doesn't stretch forward or backwards.

It goes east, west.

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah.

Jono Hey:

So just really like slightly mind blowing things.

You can't see Rob, but I've never seen his eyes quite so wide.

He's lost for words and his eyes are wide.

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah.

Jono Hey:

So you should check out, she does a really good TED talk about how language shapes how we think, which is really good.

Tons of good stuff in it.

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

Well, I mean, just on that, when in terms of body language and what you give away when you're thinking or communicating, I'm riffing this a little bit, isn't it that if we are recalling something from the past, then we'll look to our left, i.e.

for us kind of back on the timeline, because that timeline you talked about in our Western culture, Jono, for me, that definitely is left to right as time progresses.

So if you are recalling something, I think you tend to look to your left, your eyes, your eyeballs do.

Tom Pellereau:

People have a direction that they will look, yeah.

Rob Bell:

But I think this is sometimes used to determine whether somebody is lying or not.

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah.

Rob Bell:

And that then if you are asked a question, I don't know, where were you last Thursday?

Oh, I was here at home.

Or where were you last Thursday?

Oh, now I'm looking the other way.

For those taking this in audibly.

Looking forwards, yeah, I'm making it up.

I'm looking to some creative space.

Yeah.

And I think that, well, for me, that lines up with what you're talking about there, Jono, with how we think about time and how we react within our conditioning of how we think and perceive time.

Jono Hey:

I'm going to ask people about questions about time and check which way they look now.

I'm quite intrigued.

Rob Bell:

You liar.

Jono Hey:

You didn't have a coffee.

Rob Bell:

No, I was just looking that way because that's where the coffee is.

Jono Hey:

Anyway, so that was yeah, I just thought it was so fascinating because a couple of people sent me this about this ambiguity of time being forward or backwards.

Tom Pellereau:

By left or right.

Jono Hey:

This is really cool.

Or left or right, east or west.

Rob Bell:

So when I was looking at the kind of comedic values or things that have unintentionally become quite funny within that syntactic ambiguity, i.e.

sentences or phrases having different meanings, headlines, it appears, often have this ambiguity.

And I'll give you some examples of headlines.

Kids make nutritious snacks.

Mother helps dog bite victim.

And there's another one.

Prostitutes appeal to the Pope.

Jono Hey:

Do you know, I've actually I've heard of those sort of things before.

Did you come across what they're called?

Rob Bell:

I found them as part of unintended humorous examples of syntactic ambiguity.

Jono Hey:

So I learned that they're called, and I keep meaning to do a sketch of it, which is they're called garden path sentences.

Rob Bell:

Oh, no, I didn't see that at all.

Oh, OK, brilliant.

Jono Hey:

You're basically so you're leading someone one way with the sentence and then it trips you up and it goes the other way.

Because I found them.

I found a couple which was like, because he always jogs a mile seems a short distance to him.

Rob Bell:

Because he always jogs a mile seems a short distance to him.

Jono Hey:

I had another another one which was essentially of a joke.

I saw a comedian do which was when he got older, my grandmother used to put butter on my granddad's back.

After that, he went downhill very fast.

But I just remember that beginning bit.

I thought it was pretty good.

When he got older, my grandmother and you're like, yeah, he had a few others.

He was the one he did the do you know what's a nasty bee to get stung by?

But yeah, no, there were ones like Missing Lion Remains Found.

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

Jono Hey:

Quite confusing, like where you can interpret in both different ways.

There was The Old Man the Boats.

Rob Bell:

The Old Man the Boats.

Jono Hey:

So they're called Garden Path Sentences where you're like, oh, yeah, go one way.

And then it trips you and go the other ways.

Rob Bell:

Which is a whole genre of comedy, right?

It's like one line of comedy is all about that.

Taking your audience one way and then give them the old flipperoni at the end.

You know, it's a whole.

Jono Hey:

We'd do it a lot better than I can.

Rob Bell:

No, it was good.

I really enjoyed those.

So I was what did I find?

I found there's a study by Ricard Sol and Luis Sione of the Pompau Fabra University in Barcelona, so excuse my pronunciation of those names.

But it suggested that ambiguity is an essential part of how language works.

In this paper, it suggested that if every single object and concept had a unique word for it, it would be very easy for the listener to understand what was going on without any confusion.

But it's quite difficult for the speaker to construct that sentence because there's such an enormous vocabulary, right?

But if on the flip side, if there are only a few words to describe everything, then speaking would be really simple, right?

You know what you mean.

You say the few words that you've got to do that, but understanding it would be very difficult and possibly fraught with danger, right?

And so in this academic paper, it was deemed that in language, in modern languages, we've got it just about right between too many and too few words, and that the ambiguity allows for creativity and individual interpretation of stuff, like with in poetry or, and as we've been talking about there, the garden path with comedy as well.

I thought that was that was quite an interesting view on it.

Again, we've not got too many, we've not got too few, we've got it, mummy bears, porous just right.

Jono Hey:

That's really good.

Where that doesn't necessarily apply was like legal language.

And yeah, one of the sketches I've done was on the Oxford comma, which I think we might have touched on.

Do you remember that?

Rob Bell:

No, we haven't touched on that.

But I've learned about it through the sketchplanation.

And I'm not entirely sure I fully understand it, but I use it.

Carry on, Jono, let's explore that.

Jono Hey:

Yeah, so it's basically if you've got a set of items in a list, it's whether or not you have a comma after the second to last item in the list.

And the classic example was like if you have a dedication on a book, which is to my parents, Lady Gaga and God, yes, and without a comma, it's slightly ambiguous as to whether your parents are Lady Gaga and God, or is this a list of three things, your parents, I'd like to dedicate this to my parents, to Lady Gaga and to God.

And there's that classic book you've seen, which is Eat Shoots and Leaves, which is an example of the Oxford comma.

But there was there was this fascinating legal case for a company in Maine.

And in their contract, they had this line, like long line, saying the canning processing preserving freezing dry and marketing storing packing for shipment or distribution of and then carried on.

And they ended up having to pay $5 million, because there was ambiguity over whether packing for shipment was its own thing or pack or whether it was packing for shipment or distribution, whether that was one thing by itself, or whether they were two separate things packing for shipment and distribution.

Yeah.

And I think it applied to overtime pay.

And so this ambiguity in a comment, well, maybe you could interpret it this way.

There was a super episode of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast revisionist history, which talked about the use of or absence of an Oxford comma in the American Constitution.

And how it might determine like the formation of states and what you could do is basically like whether or not you can divide or add new states to attend from within a state.

And it's sort of ambiguous based on the placement of a comma or not as to whether or not you can.

So it's just really fascinating how like even like you're right, and I think it's a good point, actually, it's really helpful that language is ambiguous sometimes, but sometimes you want to be really precise.

Rob Bell:

That's amazing with something like the American Constitution, which is handwritten, right, on big parchment paper, right, with quill pens, you know, a comma, that could just be a misplaced comma could actually be just a little bit of ink or a fleck that's got on there and got ground into the paper.

Jono Hey:

Sorry.

Don't worry about that.

Rob Bell:

But the implications of it are absolutely massive.

Jono Hey:

Interesting.

Rob Bell:

Tommy, after you get involved in the legal stuff, I mean, because there must be loads of legal stuff that comes through or requires sign off from from somebody.

I won't read legal documentation most of the time, because I just know that I can't understand it.

But it dawns on me that you might have to get stuck into it sometimes.

Tom Pellereau:

We are working with some of the world's biggest retailers who can have the most enormous legal documents that we then have to sign off.

As you say, often you kind of read a sentence and you read it and you reread it and you're like, I just because quite often they have paragraph sentences with like no punctuation at all in this entire thing and you're like, what does this mean?

Jono Hey:

It's funny when you get you get so precise that you sort of need a translation to understand it.

So I guess it's true for many things.

It's like, you know, a scientific paper or a mathematic paper, you know, you have to be precise.

But as a result, most people don't really bother to make the effort to learn it all.

And the same is true with legal stuff, isn't it?

You want to go, okay, what does clause 13 really mean?

What does it mean to me?

Rob Bell:

Yeah, within, but well, so this is interesting.

So there's another category of ambiguity in language that I didn't mention earlier, which is pragmatic ambiguity, which is kind of what we're talking about here, right?

It's where the understanding of a word or phrase is based on the reality or the practicality of the context.

Jono Hey:

Yes.

Rob Bell:

Okay.

Which I guess a lot of the time in legal terminology, a lot of it hopefully is defined more by the context of what's going on around it, but not always, you know, and probably could be held held to account in a court of law for, you know, to be taken out of context, like you say with them, with the with the canning factory, you know, within the context that you could probably argue it from a practical perspective, whichever it was, but then from a from a non pragmatic perspective and looking purely at the words and the comma or lack of it could be argued some some different way.

So it's a context is obviously really, really important with the language that we use.

Jono Hey:

It's a really nice sketch, basically context is king.

And it's just it's just on this great example I saw in a research paper.

You might have seen it.

It's quite difficult to explain in a podcast, but basically it has ABC and 12 13 14.

One on top of each other.

And if you look twice, the B is exactly the same as the 13, like literally exactly the same, like I copied them.

But you read them ABC and you read them 12 13 14.

Rob Bell:

Brilliant.

Jono Hey:

And all of it is just context.

You just like, like, that's a 13 or that's a B, like without even missing a B.

And so, yeah, we take context to everything that we're trying to interpret.

But I guess you want to be careful if you're a lawyer.

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

And I guess there's a difference here in between formal and informal communication, right?

So, you know, it's very, it's very easy because we can see each other and we can hear each other in this conversation that hopefully our context is very well understood amongst amongst all three of us and hopefully by our listeners as well, who aren't necessarily seeing us.

Although you can watch extended versions of each episode on YouTube because because within within language in in the way that we're communicating here now, we've got three major components to it, right?

We've got we've got our body language that we can see.

We've got a tone of voice as well, including emphasis on different words and and there's the content of the words themselves.

So together, hopefully we can all understand what what we're saying to each other very clearly.

So an example of this kind of pragmatic ambiguity.

The cops are coming.

I tried to say that as flat as I could.

Right.

That could be understood as a really good thing or a really bad thing, depending on what the situation was and and your position within that whole scenario.

The cops are coming.

Leg it.

Oh, oh, the cops are coming.

And then with emphasis, Jono, going back to Mr.

Schnell.

Is it Schnell?

Jono Hey:

Mr.

Schnell.

Rob Bell:

Yeah, brilliant.

In spoken language, emphasis brings a lot of meaning to a sentence.

I never said she stole my money.

Right.

So many different meanings.

I never said she stole my money.

If you read, it has a different meaning.

Jono Hey:

There's tons.

I was thinking of context because one of the...

I've got a sketch on Capitan in.

You say about like most of the times you have the context and it's funny because kids often don't have the context.

And at the very bottom of our road where I grew up, there's a little...

it's a building and on it says Polish Club.

For years I wondered what the Polish Club was because it was in all caps.

And it turns out it's an example of a capitanim, which is a word which changes meaning when it's a capital or not.

And so of course it was a Polish Club.

But as a kid, I apparently didn't have that context.

I was just baffled for quite a long time.

And obviously there's some really obvious ones like Turkey, where normally because of the context, you assume, pass me the Turkey, don't assume people are talking about the country or China, right?

You know, there's another one like that.

Lent.

Tom, you say, are we in Lent now?

But you know, when you talk about Lent, that you're either talking about Lent or you lent somebody something, you know.

Rob Bell:

So I was going to flip it slightly.

And instead of talking about the ambiguity of language, I was going to talk about, I don't know if you've heard this before, but the Inuit language famously has many words for different types of snow, right?

Yeah.

Interestingly, Hawaiian language doesn't distinguish between snow and ice.

I mean, they probably don't really have to deal with that, the nuances of that cold weather too often.

But do you know which language supposedly has the most words for types of snow?

In at 5, it's Swedish with 25, in at 4, it's Icelandic with 46.

The Inuit language has somewhere between 40 and 70 words for snow.

The Sami language, Northern Scandinavia or Russia, Tommy, yeah, so you're about there.

Jono Hey:

They were the Cuffecocks, weren't they?

Rob Bell:

They were the Cuffecocks, exactly.

They've got around 180 words for snow.

But in at 1, Scottish, 421 words apparently they have for different types of snow, including gems such as fiefel, which is swirling snow, flindricken, a brief snow shower, and spitters, small flakes of wind-driven snow.

Fiefel, flindricken and spitters.

Jono Hey:

I'd like to come back in and say, how is it outside?

Findricken...

out there.

And they'd know exactly what I meant.

Tom Pellereau:

Well, they would if they were Scottish, if they were...

They wouldn't understand what you're talking about anyway.

Half the time, probably.

Or you wouldn't understand what they were saying, rather.

Jono Hey:

This is possible.

Rob Bell:

I mean, I've got it's snowing...

Tom Pellereau:

Snowing...

Rob Bell:

It's quite wet snow.

Tom Pellereau:

Wet snow, dry snow, champagne snow.

Rob Bell:

Big flakes, big snowflakes, big chunky, chunky snow.

Tom Pellereau:

Hard snow.

Rob Bell:

I think I'm pretty...

I'm scraping the barrel now.

Yeah, hard snow, yeah.

Tom Pellereau:

Neve.

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

Tom Pellereau:

That's the type of snow, isn't it?

That's when snow compacts before it becomes ice.

I think that's the process of when a glacier forms, it's snow on snow on snow and then it...

Neve and then it's ice underneath it, I think.

Remember that from...

Rob Bell:

Oh, nice.

So I'm imagining the Hawaiians don't have a word for that either.

Tom Pellereau:

No.

Rob Bell:

The Neve.

Tom Pellereau:

But they've probably got a lot of words for sand or surf.

They've probably got a lot of words for waves in Hawaii, I imagine.

Rob Bell:

I bet they do.

Whereas again, I've got big and small.

Jono Hey:

Waves.

Well, that's interesting, isn't it?

You don't have to go to different languages, just in different cultures, right?

Or not even cultures, just groups, people, dialects, of course, if you're surfing waves, you can't just call it a wave.

There's a really good wave out there today.

There might be a type of wave, but there might be some distinction to it.

I was just reading a book with an 11 year old, and it was Lego, and it had all sorts of different ways you might describe your Lego builds, which if you're spending all your days building Lego, you might come up with all these different ways of describing it.

Rob Bell:

Well, you know, if you're really into music, you know, people will, music journalists and real musos, you know, they'll have loads of words that they can use, that they have at their fingertips to be able to describe music, whereas somebody who's not necessarily that interested in music might enjoy music, but not necessarily that interested in it.

You know, yeah, it's, it's loud, it's quiet, got a bit of a beat.

I think of a, I think of a music journalist, are you?

We digress, we digress.

Is there anything anybody else would like to add on the subject of, let's call it linguistic ambiguity or around bimonthly and fortnightly?

Jono Hey:

Can I put one little plug for a poem, a link to it from the sketch I have about homonyms and homographs and homophones and heteronyms, all these different types.

And somebody, when I, when I posted that somebody sent me this poem called The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenite.

And it's basically an 800 word poem.

And it basically highlights all of the ridiculous, like pronunciations in English.

So I just, I try and I try and just give you one one verse, which is like, I will keep you Susie busy, make your head with heat grow dizzy, tear in I your dress your tear, queer fair seer hear my prayer.

And so all of these ones where you've got like Susie and busy, it's a US Y and a letter, but one of them you pronounce Susie and one of them you pronounce boozy.

Busy, busy, busy, tearing I and your tear address, but it's T E A R and head and heat is H E A but one is hair and one is heat.

And so like the whole poem is like, just the craziness of English and all the different ways that you can say these words and you look you look at a word and you're like what horse and worse, you know, like how are you supposed to know how to pronounce any of this stuff?

You just have to learn everything.

Yeah, it's just so it's amazing.

So if you look up the chaos as a poem, you'll find it at school.

Tom Pellereau:

I was very fortunate in that I had extra English for my dyslexia.

And what we would do effectively is we go through the different sounds that each of the letters could make.

So a for example, there are at least seven different ways that a can be sounds can be said, like talk, bae, bae and hey, obviously, but talk and ant and, you know, there's all these different ways that an a can sound and that's just the first letter of the alphabet.

The vowels have a huge number.

But as you say, hippo and hello and you know, it's just flipping confusing and you just have to just learn them.

And often, eventually, they just sound right.

Rob Bell:

All right, so to summarise then within the specifics of this week's sketch, are we saying that for absolute clarity, we should avoid using words like bi-weekly, bi-monthly or bi-annually and that if you'd like something to be done every two weeks, you should say fortnightly or spell it out once every two weeks or if it's twice a year, you should say you should say that exactly that is always saying bye bye to bi-weekly or every second month two times each year.

Jono Hey:

Somebody said you could maybe use semi-weekly.

Tom Pellereau:

What does that mean?

Rob Bell:

Is that twice a week?

Jono Hey:

Well, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It doesn't sound like two, does it?

Rob Bell:

No, semi-half.

Yeah.

Half weekly.

It's just.

Jono Hey:

Yeah.

Rob Bell:

Let's ban these words.

Jono Hey:

Yeah.

Rob Bell:

I mean, from my perspective, I'd like to make it quite clear that I'm quite a big fan of these opportunities for ambiguity sparked into our language.

I think it makes it a bit more fun as we talked about when you get too many vegetables.

Yeah.

Jono Hey:

And you just say, when would you like your vegetables?

Later.

We'll bring your vegetables later.

Rob Bell:

No, later than that.

It was a good week for soup.

Jono Hey:

Made lemonade.

Rob Bell:

Yeah, exactly.

Thanks for rounding that off, Jono.

I appreciate that.

Thank you very much, chaps.

Another very fun topic on language.

If you've enjoyed this conversation, you might enjoy episode 14 from series one, which was a bumper pack episode on all sorts of stuff to do with words and language.

And Jono's done loads of sketches on this kind of thing, as we've talked about in this episode.

I'll put links to all of those sketches that we referenced in the podcast episode description down below.

And there'll undoubtedly be more episodes like this in the future.

We'd love to know what you think of language ambiguity.

And if you've ever fallen foul of it, send us your emails to hello at sketchplanations.com or you can leave us messages on social media.

But before we round off this episode, I'd just like to reiterate once again that the next fresh podcast to drop in your feed after this one will be in two weeks' time.

So as mentioned at the top of the pod, we're going fortnightly so we can continue to guarantee the quality for the pod, hashtag Podqual.

So one last time for absolute clarity, this podcast is now going biweekly.

We'll see you then.

Thanks very much for listening.

Go well, stay well, goodbye.

Right, we're back.

Let's have a quick look in this week's post bag.

What have we got, chaps?

So last week we were talking about sneaky averages.

What are people saying about sneaky averages?

Jono, I think you've got...

Jono Hey:

Yeah, there was a couple of comments on it that I saw.

One of them was a suggestion, looking forward to the Sketchplanation of Kernel Density and Kernel Density and Kurtosis after that one.

So we're really getting deep into the statistics.

Another one.

Rob Bell:

Kernel Density and Kurtosis.

Jono Hey:

Kurtosis.

Rob Bell:

Kurtosis.

Jono Hey:

I don't know what they are.

Rob Bell:

Are they like statistical tools, maybe?

Jono Hey:

I don't know what they are.

Tom Pellereau:

If Jono doesn't know what they are, serious maths.

Jono Hey:

I have heard of Kurtosis, I've not heard of the other one.

Rob Bell:

Okay, good, good.

Yeah, crack on.

I'll look that up.

That's that.

I can look that up for you.

Jono Hey:

I mean, I think it might be getting a bit niche to go real into the mathematics ones.

Rob Bell:

Fair enough.

Good.

Jono Hey:

Another one from CFO who said, carry this mental image around with you.

And that's the mental image of the statistician drowning in the three feet average pool with you next time when someone presents an average to you.

It's true.

More often than not, I found says clearly someone with experience of averages saying that a lot of averages are hiding something more often than not in their experience, they say.

Yeah.

I just think if you get an average, you just you just don't know.

And you rarely in like a newspaper or something get enough information to really to really assess it and know what's going on.

Rob Bell:

Have you ever have you guys ever used an average in a speech or something or in a public presentation where you know that there's the potential for it to be sneaky and that it could be hiding something not that you are trying to hide something with it, but you just think, oh, for this audience is fine.

Let's crack on.

I'll use this average without having to explain it.

Jono Hey:

It's really true.

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah.

Jono Hey:

Because you're like, well, it takes a really long time to tell all the details.

So a real common thing would be, you know, visitors to the Sketchplanations website.

And you look at like bounce rate and which is like, how many people turned up, looked at things for a few seconds and left.

And so the average, the average visit to a website might be 40 seconds.

Maybe that was enough to read what was there.

But actually, the average visit might be even 10 seconds or something like that.

But that complete might completely hide the, you know, the few people who spent an hour on there, you know, reading things for an hour and visited 80 pages.

But the question, you know, the question is, in what you're going to present, do you have time to go into that level of detail?

Do you have time?

And do you actually have the data to go like break it all down and go, okay, well, there's no point in me saying the average time because there isn't an average.

There's people who turn up and go, oh, this is the wrong place.

And there's people who turn up and spend an hour reading because they love it.

Yeah, so you have to decide, do you have time and do you have the data to say, so I definitely done that when you're talking about, you know, website analytics and things like that.

Tom Pellereau:

Rob, are you asking if I've ever portrayed data in a presentation to say a lord who might be a business owner in a way to highlight what I want to say rather than potentially what he was thinking?

I've never, certainly never.

Rob Bell:

I wouldn't dare suggest that to me.

Despite all the tips that we were talking about, all three of us last week about how you can make graphs that are more impressive for your sales, not your sales, sales generally.

Tom Pellereau:

Is it data is like a human being?

The more you torture it, the more it'll say what you want it to say.

Rob Bell:

Sure.

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah.

Rob Bell:

Tommy, did you have a message?

I don't think it's from sneaky averages.

It was from...

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah, from someone who apologized, isn't that kind, saying they've been super busy, so they're a little bit behind on their listening.

Welcome.

Thanks for listening.

But also, he'll be glad to hear that it's now two...

Sorry, every...

It's fortnightly going forward, not bi-weekly, Robert.

Fortnightly.

But he was very impressed that I knew that it was four cylinders in his car when I yelled it out when we were in the back of Nolzi's XC90.

I was also quite relieved to see that I got it right.

I've just Googled it to just check that I had the right answer.

And he was a bit surprised that the owner of the car didn't know how many cylinders.

But I wonder how many people do.

Rob Bell:

Well, if you remember, Nolzi didn't know what a piston cylinder was.

So knowing how many the engine in his car had, it would really surprise me if he knew that.

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah.

The big question is how many pistons are there in an electric car?

Yeah.

Rob Bell:

You'd probably have a piston inside your suspension system, wouldn't you?

Inside your dampener.

A piston of sort, a piston inside a cylinder.

It's not doing the same thing.

It's not connected to a crank, as Jez pointed out in previous comments.

But yeah, I think you'd have a piston inside a cylinder for a hydraulic dampener on your suspension, wouldn't you?

Yes.

Tom Pellereau:

You're right.

Rob Bell:

Let us know.

Three engineers signing off for another week.

Thank you for all your comments.

Keep them coming in.

And we'll try and I've got homework now from this week's list of comments.

Thanks for that, guys.

But always a pleasure.

See you soon.

Tom Pellereau:

Bye bye.

Rob Bell:

All music on this podcast series is sourced from the very talented Franc Cinelli.

And you can find loads more tracks at franccinelli.com.

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