YouSaid · the spoken record

Susie Dent

lines on the record: 24
first: 2025-01-12
most recent: 2025-01-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Know what was going on, you know, whether you've got Bebop or whether you've got D Mob, whether you've got hot pants, whether you've got a psychedelic, whatever, it will tell you something about the moment and they are, yeah, they speak volumes, I think.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone thought it was a new word that it was an acronym for Council House and Violent, and there were all these acronyms invented for them. But actually we think it comes from a Romani word 200 years ago now. It was first used for just as a mate, you know, between male friends. And then it flew below the radar and then it resurfaced, meaning something quite different. So it's always possible that the ones that we think have just fizzled away will return possibly repackaged in some way. So I think they're all really valid. And I think I used to do for Oxford University Press little thing, the words of the year. And I just thought they were just really amazing snapshots. And we still obviously every dictionary publisher has their word of the year now, but not an extensive list. And I think if we could get the words together for the past century or more, we would immediately...”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, shelf life is really interesting. I think even if these are flyby nights and they don't stick around, they are still really eloquent about the time that produced them. That's what I mean about little, these little pocket distillations of history. And so I don't think they are lesser because of that. I think there are words that just I was going to say have a meteoric rise, but I always say meteors fall, they don't rise, so that's complete misnomer. But they do explode onto the scene and then sometimes they just fizzle out. But also occasionally, when we think they've gone, they come back again. So to give you a much holder example, Chav. So 2004, I think most of us will remember Chav was suddenly everywhere and it was being used in a really nasty way at the beginning by one particular website. But that had actually...”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, actually, this is going to disappoint you because I read it out to you. I think fuckwit is just brilliant and such a good put down, really. Yeah, I wish I could say I was more inventive. I mean, I find it fascinating that our swear words are so enduring, given that language moves pretty fast, you know, 500 years on from when most of these weird words appeared. Not many of them were Anglo-Saxon apart from shit. Most of them came about sort of medieval times. And all these years on, we, for all that we think that we're swearing willy-nilly and nobody cares anymore, they still have the power to cause offence or to make people laugh, awkwardly, whatever. And I see that on the comedy show that I work on all the time. They still elicit a reaction. So, the compound words Thank you. I won't tell you my.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Latter case, you exactly frustration through having a good swear. And I think any woman here who's been through labour will understand. That's having a good sweater”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A choice bit of profanity. Yeah. So it's a very hot topic, the history of swearing and also swearing itself is under quite a lot of medical scrutiny because it turns out it's actually really good for us. In the right circumstance.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She is fascinated by them because the history of profanity is really extraordinary if he trace it right back to ancient Rome through today. The things that caused defense and how they've changed over time. So she's fascinated with how our taboos have shifted. But she doesn't swear very often. But there are a few occasions in the book where emotions where she feels so strongly about something that she just delivers. Well, not a single, but”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does make me sad because I think so many people love learning about them that I like to think that first and that curiosity is still there. So I didn't know any of them until I actually started opening my dictionary and looking at them. And I feel like my life is so much richer for them. But, you know, hopefully the fact that people are here tonight or the fact that people like Words of the Day or I think people never cease to be excited by language or passionate about it, you know there may be things going on that people hate, but as long as they feel that passion, I think it's actually in really good hands. So I don't actually worry about it. I love sharing that, oh my goodness, you never know what I discovered today. And I might get an eye roll, but I just sort of, you know, especially if it's my kids, I tend to ignore it and carry on because there is so much unpacking to do. But that's why I always say.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's interesting actually the gaps in language. Well, I think I talk a little bit about the sort of palimpsest of language and of the dictionary. So a palimpsest is something where things are covered over again and again. Kind of consecrate them in some way. Oh, there's so many words that just have this, I think they pack within them some of the darker human motivations and we have lost those secret lives but sometimes I think by unpacking them we understand a bit more about history. I mean I've always said I think language distills history better than any picture.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was. And also, she was so autobiographical. I thought, oh God, I've got to change some of this. So, yeah. So she's quite a complex character from that point of view, but I think she does tend to linger on the melancholy, but she finds joy where she can.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bit of wine as well. And he has some extraordinary case studies. So he talks about a baker. From Italy, who was his melancholy manifested itself through anxiety, so he was convinced he was going to be melted by the sun. So he stayed out of the sun his whole life. Anyway, I went to town on this because I find it so fascinating, but it all went. But no, and I think it was the red pen. Yeah, the red pen. I think that was right. And I think I did quite a lot of meditating on melancholy in this because I think because Martha is quite like me in so many ways and she does live in her head. She does tend towards the melancholy, but she has also incredible inner strength because she doesn't really worry about what people think of her, which I was a deliberate characterization because that is not me.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's got this wild untamed beauty to it. It's close to new burials. It was opened, sadly to, well, because of the cholera epidemic. So the new burial places were much needed. But it's not neglected. So there's a lovely group that goes there and clears away some of the brambles. But tombstones are falling down. And it's just the most exquisitely wistful place. In one of those scenes, I did actually have Martha, who lives in her head a lot like me exploring the most brilliant book called The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, which was so important to so many writers and poets and things. And he examines melancholy where it comes from and how you might treat it. And actually a lot of our kind of modern wellness techniques you can find there, like walking, nature and that kind of thing.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite special if you live in your head, I think you learn to embrace melancholy as much as you learn to embrace joy, but one can outweigh the other. But again, it's difficult to know what came first. It is a life of examination and interrogating language suits someone who is on the melancholic side or does it then persuade you that life is very fragile and flawed and all of that stuff. I think it's probably a bit of both. But actually took out, my editor was very good with a red pen and she kept saying, look, I love all this language stuff, but this is just interfering with the plot. This has got to go. And I did fight my corner in lots of places, but there was one there's a few scenes which involve probably my favorite spot in Oxford, and I don't know if you ever went there, Alex, but it was very close to the dictionary offices where I was.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at all. I think I definitely have melancholy in me. I always have done. And I don't know whether I then sort out words to sort of, you know, fulfill that melancholy in some way because I think melancholy can be really creative.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You better come and look at it. It's still alive, kind of how isn't that? Yes. No, it's totally true. Our animals communicate in such in the same way. This is a very deep political subject, isn't it? But that's why I think our treatment of animals should be fundamentally changed because they are, I think, far more sentient than we give them credit for.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Waiting calls, you only have to hear, you know, if I'd let my cass out into the garden and you suddenly hear the birds kind of, you know, especially when it's birdings, when they're laying their eggs and six, you can definitely hear that alarm call. So I would definitely call all of that language.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes I absolutely would. And there has been extraordinary, some extraordinary findings in recent years, which again is going to sound ridiculous, but that ducks, for example, in Somerset have a definite dialect. So they, they have a different sound and a different pitch to ducks up north. Some of our animals really are. There was something in the paper again about some Scottish hornbills, I think. They definitely speak in a different way. So I would definitely call it language for sure.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Weird. So I often wonder why did we start making that noise? Why did we start clapping our hands? I know that applause meant something very different in Roman theatres to how it did now. It actually could mean get off if you were a poor performer. But yeah, all of those are fascinating. And I wish I had the historical knowledge to be able to give you a definitive answer as to why words.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it comes to baby talk and the first words that we tend to articulate, they are very much, well, words like mum, for example, is very much based on baby talk. So we get a lot of our modern words from the ways that babies articulate what's important to them. So if they're going, that gave us mum and so on. It's very difficult sometimes to know what came first. But why words? It's such a good question. And I often think that I often have a slightly out of body experience with laughter. Do you want to see people laughing and you just think it's a bit, do you remember the smasher adverts, the older people here will remember these aliens laughing around. It's a bit like that. I just think it's such an odd thing to, if you catch yourself laughing, you become quite self-conscious about it because what you're doing is sometimes it's just very...”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A language that was feeding all of these down. So we've tried to reconstruct it and they, quite reasonably about five years ago, some linguists essentially posited what they thought were the earliest concepts that were given form in language and that was fire unsurprisingly danger words to do with food primarily to do with warmth and to do with being predated or being a predator which you know unsurprising really but those were some of the first to appear in all of the languages low on the family tree”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know it is. Is there an answer to that? There's a definitive answer to that. I mean, our earliest words, it's quite complicated because we are looking at ancient languages and trying to look at the connections between all of them. And sometimes these languages are so ancient that we have to reconstruct them. So there is something called Proto-Indo-European PIE to linguists. When we don't have any evidence of it, but we can tell if that is at the top of the family tree, we can see the relationships between words in lots and lots of different languages from Sanskrit to Germanic languages, etc. And so we can hypothesize that there was”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is very creative. And then I think there was a ban on some of the sites of the Obergin emoji. So people started writing out Aubergine. But actually we have a lovely makeup artist on Countdown whose name I can possibly divulge. But she was on a dating site and she is Persian, loves Aubergines, was literally throwing them to every single message. And it was only when she said, I don't understand what I'm getting back. that we were able to incredibly”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were replacing perfectly good words and vocabulary. But then if you look back to hieroglyphs in the ancient world, they were designed in exactly the same way, albeit with possibly more mystery attached. So pictorial representations of language are equally fascinating, I think. But that was quite hard to do in a book, actually. So that was an area I couldn't really go down that.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Exactly right. And so many areas of language operate in just that way, slang being the most obvious example. Slang is designed to keep outsiders out and insiders in. And as soon as that is even remotely decoded and authorities or parents, whatever scale the wall, it has to move on again. So it is the fastest moving area of language. But then you also have emojis, which are designed to be fairly transparent, but then sometimes you get emojis where you just think, I have no idea how this is being used. And there was originally quite a lot of resentment about emojis because people thought it was replacing.”
2025-01-12 · Intelligence Squared · Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT