New mask said the crowds would continue to defy the ban there have been further clashes on the streets of the semi autonomous territory on Sunday and for the 1st time Chinese army troops garrisoned in Hong Kong have issued a warning to the protesters police in Kansas City say they're looking for the suspects who killed 4 people in a shooting at a private member's bar early on Sunday 5 other people were injured in the attack in which at least one handgun was used t.j. Thomas itch is with the Kansas City Police Department we do not believe it's random We do believe that this was an isolated incident I guess you would call it we don't feel that these these suspects are going to go out and do this again. World news from the b.b.c. . Police in Nepal have arrested the former speaker of parliament Krishna behinder Mara after a female member of staff accused him of rape he denies the allegations he is under a senator Rajan question about how the model was a former moister rebel under senior leader of the governing Nepal community party the woman who works in the parliament secretary aide accuses Mr Maher of assaulting her while drunk at her apartment on Sunday he resigned from the post office speaker on Tuesday saying he wanted to make it easier for an independent investigation he dismissed the allegations as baseless It's a rat in a poll for such a senior politician to be arrested on allegations of sexual assault thousands of French people are marching in Paris to protest against draft legislation that would enable single women and lesbians to get state funded fertility treatment the legislation has been passed by the lower house of parliament and will go before the Senate later this month it proposes allowing all women under $43.00 access to I.V.'s treatment it would also allow children conceived using donated sperm to find out the donor's identity once they enter adult hood. The president of Mali Abraham Baca Cato has rejected talk of it coup attempt following recent attacks in which nearly 40 soldiers were killed Mr Cater said Mollie was at war but that people should not be worried about a military coup suspected jihadist raided to Mali in military camps earlier this week near the border with Turkey in a fast so killing troops and making off with large amounts of arms and ammunition. Iran says the state owned firm Petro pass will take over all work to develop an offshore gas field after a Chinese company pulled out of the project last year the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation signed up to a multi-billion dollar joint venture to bring phase 11 of the South Park's gas field on stream but then suspended cooperation after President drop withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement b.b.c. News. Welcome to innovation hub I'm Carol Miller sometimes an idea takes off in a way that's kind of shocking and a little more than 200 years ago an important tool doctor had an idea that shapes our world to this day the doctors idea was that the people living in a mountainous area sandwiched between Russia and Turkey and Armenia and Iran were if he was being honest about it pretty much the most ideal people around the mountains in this particular region were called the caucus is and these ideal people he said could be called Caucasians and what's interesting is that the man who invented it by looking at different skulls and then deciding that the people of the caucuses had the most beautiful skulls and the caucuses is close to spoil region but he extended that to saying that Caucasian would be everyone from Western Europe to northern India Angelus thingy is a science journalist and the doctor she's talking about was a German man named Johann Friedrich Blum and Bach It was never scientific you know it really has no meaning whatsoever in the way that we use it now Seanie says that Pullman Bach wasn't alone in categorizing people during the 700 for a couple of reasons 1st the rise of science spurred the rise of categories of all sorts and a compulsion to understand how the world worked at the same time the rise of European empires made it feel to many European scientists anyway like their own sense of superiority could perhaps be understood through race which Seanie says explains why bloomin back to find Caucasian so broadly a term which after all was once pretty much tied just to the region around the caucus is mountains what he meant to include himself and how could he do that knowing that he wasn't from that region he couldn't he. Do that by stretching as broadly as possible and ideas about human difference him and how far the similarities spread of course came under these blankets and they also depended on the politics of the time so our ideas of race and who is superior and who is inferior and who belongs under one banner and who doesn't really are shifting quantities depending on the time and the place that we live in Simi is the author of superior the return of re science in the book she looks deeply at a topic that has an lot of relevance right now and has become part of politics and public discussions she argues that the invention of race the concept as we understand it today really happened in the 7800 of course people have always encountered those who looked different Think about the crusades or when Marco Polo went to China or even when the Egyptians and Greeks and Romans expanded their territory we can't know for sure for example how the ancients still to about human difference how they catalog people if they even did if they thought about human difference as a shifting quantity or a kind of hard and fast quantity as we do now some people say ni said Bunny that skin color could change dramatically as you moved it would darken if you moved to a warmer place and lighten if you moved to a colder place and then the Enlightenment rolled around this is a time of in purses and this is about cataloguing the world understanding how the world works and then filming typologies and trying to order nature so what you see for example in column a is he was one of these early research is a thing because he did this He catalogued the natural world animals plants and so it was almost a natural consequence of this that he would also look at humans and he would look at us and think will have been humans then because to Gries Can we also be placed in these kind of boxes some scientists thought there were just a few races some. I thought there were dozens and dozens and the fact that we still use the word Caucasian to refer to people who hail from places as far fun as Iran Scotland and St Louis it underscores the notion that in 1000 invented more than 200 years ago has had real staying power though Seanie No it's how we think about race that is ever shifting in the 1900 century for instance one of the earliest sets of legislation to ban immigration on the basis of race in the us was against Chinese immigration there was this idea that Chinese immigrants would be somehow not as good as Western European immigrants they just wouldn't contribute as much as it was a month having them and today Chinese immigrants still Asian immigrants the held up as kind of model American Citizens of people who now people who kind of cling still to these racial hierarchies they claim that Asians and people in that part of the world have the highest i.q. Of any in the willed and these racial stereotypes change to match up to how society is doing at the time in fact when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in the late 1900 and for years afterwards the us didn't even keep track of people coming over the southern border from Mexico there was no border patrol those were not the people the government was concerned about but in the early years of the 20th century there were immigrants who worried American leaders those immigrants were Jews Attalia and people from some other countries whose arrival deeply troubled President Teddy Roosevelt Here's Catherine Benton Cohen a scholar on immigration at Georgetown University who I talked to in 2018 he was very concerned about this thing that folks call race suicide right that white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women's birthrate had been falling since 790 basically where as new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. High birth rates of course a lot of people from those groups Italians Jews Slavs they now do you themselves as American and mainstream is anybody else which Angela Saini says makes you realize that an idea is open to continual reinvention and I think this speaks to how race as an idea is used and abused by those with power it always has been you know it's used to protect certain groups of people and used to beat of the people of the head with and is still used in that way so you can see in the modern day rhetoric around for example Hispanic immigrants in the us this kind of language the tone that these are somehow undesirable citizens these are the kind of people we don't want when of course when you look at the kind of heritage or make up ancestral make up of people in South America they have a very broad ancestry including white European So these ideas about who gets to belong and who doesn't very heavily politically loaded and that always it always have been to do with power and economics and politics race really is just a pawn in this game it's a tool if feel scientific it's a way to make what are essentially political arguments sound like intellectual arguments I want to ask you about somebody who is really important and interesting in this idea about race in the middle 88800 Charles Darwin comes on and says something that at the time was really young people up which was this idea that humans are descended from other animals you know like you know for people who really believe the idea of the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden this was just throwing that on its head and I wonder what that did in what his work did. Add to these ideas that is you were saying like in the 1700s had been developed about race well in some ways what Darwin did was help universalize humanity so by stressing that we all had one common ancestor that kind of helped reinforcing the idea that had existed since in the in the enlightenment that we will one human species that we couldn't be separated in that way and the fact that we can for example breed with each other successfully and that we have far more in common and this is one thing Darwin wrote about in our responses in our emotions and the kind of these physical features that we have we have far more in common than we do apart so we are united in that sense Darwin was an abolitionist and he belonged to a family of great abolitionists he very very firmly believed having travelled and seen the horrors of slavery that slavery was a bad thing and yet he also couldn't relinquish the idea that there might be some kind of racial hierarchy within the human species that perhaps some people were better than others or more advanced or more evolved than others and that kind of speaks. To how ingrained these social and cultural ideas were at the time but even someone as careful as Darwin couldn't help of full prey to these kind of racial hierarchy ideas so did Darwin and mean the idea that everybody comes from the same like original group in Africa that's pretty game changing and profound did he help explode at all some of the race ideas that had come about you know in the previous 100 years or so well the out of Africa POTUS actually has only really been proven in recent decades so not into wins time I think in many ways on balance Darwin did a great deal to unite the human species to make us understand that we are really one human species you know genetically we are more than 99 percent identical in fact there is we are more similar than chimpanzees are to each other genetically we are remarkably homogeneous as a species does not to say there isn't difference between us and it is this kind of difference that we see this phenotypic difference in for example skin color or had texture or facial features that we pick up on because it's so obvious it's on the surface and this is really what has carried the science of human difference through into the 20th and 21st centuries is trying to understand that there is of course human variation we are every person is different from the next how does this play out is it individual or is it in groups and if it is in groups and how do these groups work and how can we define them the thing is it is very difficult to define them and the reason for that is similarity and difference works from individual to individual the Vost majority of the differences between people are down to individual differences you know more than 95 percent this. What makes me different from you right group difference accounts for a tiny tiny percentage of what makes us difference and it's statistical so there isn't for example no black gene no white gene there is no gene that exists in all the members of one group and not in another so it's always and after it and it's very very fuzzy The only point at which race really starts to make any kind of genetic sense is at the level of the immediate family so I have a lot genetically in common for example with my parents and with my son and with my sisters I have a little less with my cousins and with my aunts and uncles and then a little less again with my extended family and a little less again the further and further you get away right now historically we have tended to live near kin as human beings not always for much example my parents are immigrants so we don't live near our extended family but you know people have tend to live near their families and this is what communities may have some kind of a loose statistical genetic similarities but that similarity gets weaker and weaker and weaker the bigger that group of people gets and it feels tight at the level of the family at the level of the country well the continent it is so fuzzy as to become almost meaningless so to that point I want to play a little clip about that idea of human genetic diversity am I did an interview in 2017 with the geneticists and OSs there Adam Rutherford and this is him talking about genetic diversity within Africa so that the example he gave his life if you take 2 African people say one from Uganda and one from Ethiopia Ok they are more likely to be more different to each other than either one of them is to a European or an Indian or Chinese man and so there is more variation within Africa than there is in the rest the well put together. Angela Saini do you think people have trouble wrapping their heads around that because in some ways were so distracted by like the visual and not so much of who we are as people has nothing to do with what you can see. Yes and we essentially is about groups that we are not familiar with so one thing I often see in the u.k. For instance is people saying Kenyans make great runners because look at all the math and when is a Kenyan and the reason many people say that is because they may be the only Kenyans they have ever seen a marathon runners on television so it's very easy to essential eyes when you live in a society you see the great diversity around you nobody in this country has ever said to me look at how well white British athletes do in the world there must be something really remarkable about being white and British that make them do really well and the reason for that is when you are white Britain living in Britain you see there are some people write very fast and some people have very fast and slow and there are others who is smart and there are those who are dumb just like there isn't every single society but we essentially it's about the people we don't know the people we don't encounter are the ones that we form these generalizations about and this is one of the deepest problems when it comes to race is that we fall into these lazy stereotypes based on these lazy generalizations because we don't know people right if we just knew that every country in the world has a distribution of talents and skills and shapes and sizes just like you just like the country you live in then you wouldn't be so quick to kind of make these over generalizations but. Ok let's take a quick break here I'm talking to science journalist Angela Seine and when we come back I'm look at politics and race right now and on into the future if you want to know more about any of the history that we've discussed so far from theories of race during the Enlightenment to how trials Darwin shook things up we've got resources for you at our website innovation have dot org Also there is my full interview with Catherine Benton Cohen about how our immigration system was entirely invented about 100 years ago. Our Julie over concerns about migrants from southern and eastern Europe from p.r.i. And radio and here on Miller and this is innovation hubs will be right back support for innovation hub comes from Northeastern University where experience transforms learning and discovery throughout its global university system with industry partners worldwide and campuses in the u.s. And Canada northeastern dot edu slash experience. Support for j p r comes from our listeners and from Anderson auto body a national and a family owned and operated auto body and complete collision repair shop specializing in paint and body work and arson auto body works with all insurance companies and repairs all makes and models of vehicles Andersen's offers headlight restoration as well as loaner and rental vehicles and shuttle service located on Highway 99 in North Ashland open Monday through Friday 8 to 5 more at Andersen Auto Body dot com and at 541-488-3635 thank you for listening to j p r to stay abreast of current events did you know we also offer Jeff not a noncommercial Internet service provider that gives you direct online access to global news and information sports entertainment and more Jeff net is the only i.s.p. That directly supports j p r and helps us bring public radio to southern Oregon and Northern California you have a choice of internet provider choose Jeff this is Jeff net dot org or call 866 Jeff net. Welcome back to innovation house and Karen Miller soon people have secrets they want to keep like one fairly famous British man from the southwest of England this particular man had damage to his head and looked like he might have been in some sort of nasty fight if he had a name no one knew it but they did know what to call him so Chatham a is a skeleton that was discovered in Chad a gulag and which of these caves in England about 100 years ago in the early 20th century that science journalist Angela Seanie and yes in the absence of a name for this fellow he was called Cheddar man he lived about 10000 years ago and he was dubbed by many the 1st Brit this is what people look like in Western Europe and Britain 10000 years ago not what we would have expected and this. By the secrets terror man was keeping a cutting edge 2800 analysis of his d.n.a. Revealed some pretty personal stuff about him presumably could die just now because of that I mean with the advent of falling off to the time of Chatham and so we're getting home all of you how we relate to people in Europe at the time and how we were right in Britain where Chris Stringer who you just heard talking to the b.b.c. Had spent something like 40 years studying Cheddar man before the 2018 d.n.a. Analysis and he knew that lactose intolerance aside one of the most exciting things for the public to understand is what Cheddar man who after all was thought of as the 1st Brit looked like he had very very dark skin you know by modern standards he would be considered blood blue eyes and dark skin and this is this is kind of it was a shock to scientists because many similar skeletons found throughout Western Europe show the same kind of features dark skin blue eyes and so this was common among some together as in Western Europe around 10000 years ago Chris Stringer this scientist who studied Cheddar man did indeed fit the skeleton into a category that feels a little unusual to us now but that once was ordinary Angela Saini the science journalist is the author most recently of superior the return of Ray science and she says the analysis of chatter man's d.n.a. Should help shake up any notion we have that there are biological roots to race instead she argues humans are now and always have been in a state of flux what does it say about it is of ethnicity indigeneity to know that the 1st Britons would not have looked like modern day white Britons to know that in the past we didn't look the way that we do you know nobody looked the way that we do now and also that there was always migration a. ciarán And the populations were always migrating all over the world and moving back and forth and and as one geneticists described it to me David Reich like a trellis this is how we should think about human movement throughout history not that we stretched out across the world and then stayed where we are and then adopted renditions but that we will always moving and there is this great trellis that describes human difference but what was fascinating to me as a kind of woman of Indian heritage is so brown skinned British person and I consider myself fully British I am British I was born here I've lived my whole life here my son lives here and he can also considers himself British but we have brown skin. Should my brown ness stop me from feeling fully British There are people that I lament with in this country who feel that to be truly British is to be white and what I would say is well the Chatham and. So is he but in this he was no longer before you. I wonder what you think of our conceptions of race and how they're being reinvented in a time we're talking about genetics and like at a time when people are so interested in looking at their ancestry and sending in a thing the 23 and Me and finding out oh whoa that this thing I thought I was maybe I am but I'm also you know a little bit of this other country and what about this other place all over the other place. I just wonder how you think that's kind of changing the game. You know when you think back to like we're talking about with the 700 or people like there are these really very pure categories right car Cajun and whatever you know I think mongoloid you know I did these very very pure categories and now you kind of see that some of that lack of purity right there was never any purity right going back throughout history but like never now genetics kind of reveal it. It does in some ways but in kind of troubling ways because even these d.n.a. Ancestry tests rely on modern day categories in order to make these generalizations so when a test comes back it will say you're for example 80 percent South Asian 10 percent something else you know or Nordic they are using categories of only been invented. The idea of the nation state is fairly recent you know these ideas did not exist 10000 years ago and and more importantly we didn't look as we did 10000 years ago there was no kind of cultural physical resemblance to people. And people now so this idea that somehow there were pure groups of people that look the same and that somehow over time this has been muddied it was being muddied from the beginning always muddy as a species because this is the nature of us you know human beings have always moved around they've always interbred In fact we didn't just interbreed amongst each other we also interbred with other now extinct humans like Neanderthals and Denise of ns so we were always mixing and this is the story of who we are every single one of us we are all a mixture of traits So for example the variance for white skin the genetic variants for palest skin you see them not just in Europe and in East Asia you also see them in sub-Saharan Africans you know you see these genetic variants scattered throughout populations all over the world because we are and always have been a mix and to think that if we go far back enough in time that we can somehow isolate who we really are you know get back to some kind of pure origin is just a fallacy. How do you talk to people about the fact that. In some ways as you're saying like a lot of these categories are much more fluid than we'd want if there are any categories at all because you also have people working like in medicine who talk about you know it's really important to understand that different illnesses may manifest differently in different groups of people that maybe different drugs don't work in exactly the same way like an example of an illness might be like Tay-Sachs disease which is particularly common in Ashkenazi Jews a well known example so if those kinds of differences exist then how do you say like oh but differences in intelligence are strength or whatever don't exist Well we have to remember that those kind of differences like Tay-Sachs are isolated and rare and the reason they exist in the ways that they do is because in the same way that some genetic diseases run through families if you have a very tight community of people who have stayed very tight knit over generations and you will also get those kind of diseases spread throughout the community in the same way as you would in a family that makes perfect sense that doesn't mean that community is now a separate race different from everybody else it just means that certain genetic traits of past and filtered within that community that's all means so if the idea of race and racial hierarchy was invented at certain point in time and built on. Where do you think we are now in terms of like the impact of that invention how much it's it lives on how much it's dissipated like where do you place us. I read a lot of books on the genetics of race when I was writing c. Period and one thing they often too is kind of rubbish the idea of race right and say you know we should just stop thinking about people whose races we shouldn't see this and we shouldn't use these categories anymore we should think about people in this way and I think it's right that we shouldn't think biologically about people in this way but race was made real through overuse it was made real by politics it was made real by slavery and genocide and colonialism and all the horrible horrific things that would done in the name of these superior and inferior categories these ideas that some people are better than others and we live with the consequences of that now so until we have as societies reconciled ourselves with the legacies of these ideas with the damage that they have done and that they continue to do to us then we can't stop using these categories socially and politically in order to assert our rights and to address those historic wrongs so when you think about how this all moves forward this this theory that's been thread of around for at least a few 100 years now 300 years where do you think these ideas about race are headed. I am less hopeful now than I used to be because of the direction the societies seem to be heading in you see the rise of this kind of strongman politics throughout Europe in the us in parts of Asia a kind of again biology izing of difference that we haven't really seen since the 1920 s. 1930 s. And to some extent perhaps a little bit post-war but. I really worry about the society at the moment I worry not just a kind of societal level philosophical level but also personally I am a non white woman living in a country in which there is also a resurgence of the far right and I worry for my child because I really didn't think that he would have to see this I thought he would be living in a more enlightened age that we wouldn't have these problems when he was born the bomber was in the White House and I thought that would be the wall that he would live in you know hopeful positive pluralist world in which we had moved on from these debates and now it feels as though with again fighting over the same old things we're having the same old debates that should have been put to bed a really long time ago and we're back here again I really hope that we come out of this betta that society somehow forges a more enlightened path out of this and recognizes history and educates itself about the history and doesn't repeat the same mistakes Angela Saini is the author of superior the return of race science Angela thank you very much thank you . From debut g.b.h. Radio n.p.r. I am Carol Miller and this is an aberration hob will be right back support for innovation comes from the Museum of Science in Boston working to push the boundaries of what's possible by empowering the next generation of critical thinkers with interactive exhibits innovative programs and pre-K. Through 12 curricula learn more at m o s dot org. Just because you're on the road or live outside the j.p. Our broadcast area doesn't mean you have to give up listening to Jefferson Public Radio you can always stream it from any browser at i.j.a. P.r.s. Org but you can also download the free j.p. App with it all 3 j.p. Our services are available to stream on your phone or compatible device that means you can listen to j p r anywhere and anytime download the j p r app from the App Store play and never again be out of touch with quality music and information you've come to expect from j p r. I'm going to. And then. I have. I considered that this could be an opportunity for me to make a name and I would really like to know but I really think if you're my favorite radio join the club donate your car visit. Welcome back to innovation. Happens of course that even when you think you're paying attention to the big picture little something slips by you stay with us we're about to take you on an exciting and we'll be right. That was election night of the year 2000 a night that soon started to fall apart at least on t.v. We're going to now project and importantly and for Vice President Al Gore n.b.c. News projects that he wins the 25 electoral votes in the state of Florida it turns out the governor Jeb Bush was not his brother's keeper the family had been joking and seriously that it could be a Thanksgiving behind n.b.c. Anchor Tom Brokaw on a big graphic of the Us Florida turned blue and slid into Al Gore's column which would have been fantastic news. For the Democrats if it had stuck and the Bush campaign is not contesting the projected victory for Al Gore in the state of Florida we have color that blue for Al Gore if Florida is being contested neck itself back in play we shake up the map all over again of course this was the election that went on and on and for weeks that election night red and blue map became a fixture on the news late night host David Letterman who was getting impatient waiting for results to come in from Florida saw the potential for a solution candidates work out a compromise and thank God not a minute too soon here's how we're going to go George w. Bush will be president for the red states. That we're going to be president of the blues. We were looking at those maps for a long time and we were talking about the red states in the blue states initially literally which ones were going to be Bush states which ones were going to be Gore states that's Katherine Connor Martin head of u.s. Dictionaries at Oxford University Press and her job is to think about how the English language is changing right before our eyes those changes she says always reflect help culture is changing and when millions of Americans watched the election returns come in on Election Day in 2000 when they were really seen was the beginning of the cultural shift and America divided into red and blue but that was very quickly transferred to a notion of the kinds of qualities of a state that would vote Republican or would vote Democrat and this also begat watts of other interesting languages so we very quickly got purple states and that was used to describe a swing state and now we use red and blue and purple without the state part of these just all purpose descriptors of aspects of the American political social milieu. Part of that 1000000 is certainly an increasing polarization since 2000 but the way that we talk about that polarization is when you think about it kind of random read is typically associated with communism and with socialist parties so if you were to look at similar electoral maps in a European country you're going to see the furthest left most likely will be depicted in red not the furthest right as is in the case in our example but it's on a completely arbitrary that those colors happened to be shown and that Connor Martin says is the neater of language as words and phrases become useful we pick them up and then we forget or maybe we never even knew how they came to be so if you think about the phrase a flash in the pan What are you picturing a lot of people are picturing like a frying pan on the stove and actually that's exactly what I picture Well the pan in that case is actually part of an old kind of gun the pan was some place where gunpowder was put and if something went wrong when you attempted to fire the gun you would only get a flash in the pan you would see the light but the projectile wouldn't actually come out of the gun so it's like a big sound but nothing comes of it but we can all say a flash in the pan we know exactly what it means we've all internalized this metaphor but very few people know what the original literal meaning is so this is a way that we can have these. These connections that for a brief moment some English speakers somewhere new Both of these things the literal and the figurative but then one of them goes away and you can have that figurative live on and we create new pictures in our heads to make sense of them Conor Martin says that as technology and culture change around us they're changing our language English is molding itself to what we need now and we'll get to the question of whether a world filled with texting and tweeting might lead us to a bigger perhaps more concerning change but 1st apart from red states and blue states here's a nother thing that seems to be shifting according to Connor Martin pronouns which you might vaguely remember talking about once or twice in 7th grade but what's going on now is something that no one has seen in hundreds of years we don't know yet how this is going to work out but it looks like we might be experiencing something now in English that hasn't really happened since the Middle English period in terms of a widespread change in pronoun use which is a pretty you know pronouns are like something that we you know words like I and me and you and they and him and her these are fundamental building blocks of language so it's pretty hard for them to be nudged So to hear the change that's going on here's a sentence to consider anyone can come and pick up their paycheck and you're saying there because you don't know you're not specifying whether they're a male or female Now you could say anyone can come and pick up his paycheck which makes a little more sense and anyone is singular and that used to be done commonly people knew that you meant men or women but people usually just used him or his but then that started seeming kind of not sided so we shifted to anyone can common pick up his or her paycheck now though lots more people are saying what you heard Katherine Connor Martin say before anyone can come and pick up their paycheck. Why 1st she says a cultural shift more people have felt comfortable in recent years saying that they have a non-binary gender identity if you say he or she you're automatically excluding people who don't think of themselves as he or she so that's another reason to use those nonspecific contexts 2nd there's been a technological shift as more and more relationships personal business except for a exist mostly on line the gender of the person that you're sending messages to becomes a lot less clear especially if they have a name like Alex or if they have a name that we aren't familiar enough with the name inventory of their culture to understand what the gender is likely to be of that name if we're interacting with people who we aren't seeing in person or if as a society we become less concerned with the specific gender of people were we're referring to who knows we might start to prefer they in all kinds of context so that hasn't happened yet but I think it's a really interesting thing to watch and that's an area where we see social change potentially driving linguistic change when you help write dictionaries you also think a lot about the pluses and minuses of that sort of linguistic change and one minus many people see now is that English has become a disastrous buff a of acronyms and as you'll hear in this cell phone commercial that kids have kind of gone down the rabbit hole all the texting on t.v. I know b.j. It is a big deal who are you texting 50 times a day I became Maybe if I can't tell you b.f.s. Kill I'm taking away your phone. May have a bill that puts a day or so is living in the land of o.-m. G. The end of civilization Well maybe but only if civilization ended in the early 1900 . S. From 1917 an hour that was written to Winston Churchill my guy showed up at like 998917 Ok. So that one is totally shocking and I remember when we were working on that entry and you know it's really unbelievable but actually while it's interesting this 917 example it didn't actually beget any widespread usage of i.m.g. Then in 1904 we have a Usenet newsgroup where someone says oh m.g. And that's probably indicative of in the mid ninety's this actually being a thing but suddenly in widespread use it's spreading on the Internet and then people actually start to say it out loud so so in fact what you were thinking the 1990 s. Was exactly right to somebody is running Winston Churchill 917 and they write oh m g in this letter Yeah he did there's some some context there so the knighthoods and honor is in the u.k. So they have these initialism titles like o.b.e. Or Ok Ok Ok so this letter says I hear that a new order of knighthood is being considered and then he says oh m g brackets Oh no explanation my god explanation shower it on the Admiralty. So he seems to be making a kind of pun about what a new order of knighthood would sound like and then the oh my God phrase but it's unmistakable he's definitely using o m g to mean oh my God it's just that's an isolated use it's in this one letter presumably Winston Churchill reads it and then maybe no one ever thinks about it and it's completely spontaneously created among Internet users in the 1900 the case so just to continue with our kind of downfall of civilization theme here I want to ask you about a word that I remember teachers heating when I was in school and it's the word like I just wonder what it's kind of amazing rise says to you and I'm going to give you a little display of like an action going to go back about 25 years here to the movie Clueless which is about a bunch of kids at Beverly Hills High School in California. Here's a speech in history class by the main character it's about whether oppressed people should be given refuge in America so Ok like right now for example the Haiti ends need to come to America but some people are all what about the strain on our resources and it's like when I had discarded party for my father's birthday right I said r.s.v.p. Because it was a sit down dinner but people came like did not r.s.v.p. So I was like totally by go Catherine and obviously it's a movie but it exemplifies this worry people have that people are using fillers all the time they rely on them 1st of all has people always worried that English was going down hill Yes Ok. It's change that we perceive in our lifetimes because it a lot of people complain about on the radio which is she begins with so Ok which I don't know if you've ever heard that complaint but but as a lexicographer about 10 years ago maybe I was fielding a lot of questions about what's going on with people beginning an utterance with so and it it's something that's existed for a long time but it's become more common just like the quoted of all and certainly like which you know the people who are against that I think that battle has been. I so I question about that when did people start using like so much as a filler. Is this a is this a new thing that people dry to fill their sentences with something when they can't I don't know if like is used only as a filler it may be also used as a sign that you're in the in crowd or you are cool I don't know but give me a sense of where this thing like comes from like as a filler goes back to the mid 20th century Ok and then by the 1970 s. Another use of like emerged which was this quote a tive like where you would say I was talking to my friend and she was like oh my god you're him azing and I was like so it's almost like the beginning of quote you know it's like you're putting in quotes but instead of quotes which are weird in a spoken sentence you're saying he was like No I'm never doing that yeah in the clip from clueless She also used all that way so you know I was all like God I can't believe it right here and that still is very much I think marked a slang right but the filler like which also emerged in the latter half of the 20th century is just an ordinary part of American discourse now. Now for everyone under probably the age of $4550.00 it's just pretty widespread is that any kind of sign to have the Decline and Fall of English No Ok because language is changing all the time and there have always been filler words and people probably always disliked them but now with things like reality t.v. But also podcasts and then in a written format if you think about Twitter which is sometimes a lot like speech but also sometimes not like speech at all but in in any case is this unedited kind of expression these kinds of casual utterances and ways of expressing oneself are now available to a worldwide audience immediately and so that creates much more opportunity for them to spread and it makes us more aware of them and perhaps it also creates more impetus to be opposed to them because in the old way of novelty moving from person to person slowly over time you might not have realized it was happening there might have been more of a frog in a pot of boiling water a situation where you would hear it something used by a few people and then it builds up and because it took more time it might have seemed less intimidating whereas now we can see language change while it's happening sometimes we can see that there's that's this famous word Fleak in on Fleak. A young woman coined that word wall making a Vine video of herself on the old social media video platform vine old this was and 2014 years old talk about what that word means because I have to say I very recently learned this phrase on Fleak Ok so on Fleak means like perfect great on point and in this clip this person who goes by the name of peaches Munro she's a young black woman in Illinois she's looking at her eyebrows and she says eyebrows on Fleak and she's just inventing this word. I think it's just like they're so perfect and that's why I'm going to call them How do we know that she was inventing it that like it wasn't her circle friends also used it we know she just came up with it we know because people have asked her and that's what she said Ok So we found her and that's another crazy thing about the world today so we have no reason to disbelieve that this just came to her but it struck a chord for whatever reason and very quickly this word 1st started to be spread through hip hop music so it occurred in the lyrics of some songs. And then it became popular on social media people are using this term on Fleak and within like 9 months it's being co-opted by brands and I can't remember exactly who this is but maybe Arby's or or I hop or something has a thing with like pancakes on Fleak. So in like less than a year you have something going from a spontaneous utterance by an individual who is not famous and doesn't otherwise have a huge platform to have gone this whole cycle once your word is being appropriated by brands it's almost dead right you have this entire slang cycle happening in this really much shorter period of time so that's a way that I think the world of today is probably really different from the linguistic change world of English in the past are there groups of people that you think have like an outsized influence on language whether it's young people that we girls of course rose to prominence in the 1980 s. And then people of all ages and geography started to pick up some of the ways that they talked I just wonder if anybody kind of gems out it you maybe especially if we don't really register how much power they have it's quite possible I would say where the influence lies changes over time. So in a period like World War One World War 2 or Vietnam where you have all of these you know primarily young men from different walks of life coming together and working in the military for a while in periods like that we see military usage becoming really powerful and important but that's not always the case now it's very clear that African-American English is a huge driver of linguistic innovation you know on a worldwide scale and what makes you think that like why is it clear to you Well if you look at what people think of as Internet slang or youth slang a lot of the time once you peel back the layers it turns out to actually be African American English in origin so you have the power of hip hop music which is a really lyrics oriented art form you have just black Twitter as a function you have these millions that are creating and experiment ing with language and that are regarded as being cool or they're influential they're culturally and socially influential in a way that people borrow that language even if they don't know where it's coming from you know that's where we get the word cool from that came to us from jazz slang really regionally was African-American I think the 1st usage that we know that is from Zora Neale Hurston. Finally I've got to ask since you merely help write dictionaries and we've been talking about all these ways in which English is evolving and turning into something different do you happen to have a favorite word I have a favorite word that a friend of mine who's also like the Congress forgives is her favorite word and when I heard it I thought oh that's so good I want to be my favorite word to Ok and that word is mondegreen Wow I don't know that one case so I'm on the green is a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mis hearing especially of the lyrics to a song like think of an a song that you commonly misunderstand I totally around grounds in my coffee instead of clouds in my coffee. So it comes from a poem that has the phrase laid him on the green in the ballad of the Bonnie Earl of Marie Ok and so laid him on the green is interpreted as Lady Mondegreen. And this was proposed in 1904 it's kind of a word to be used for Miss hearings of that type and it's caught on since then no that's really helpful that's a good 30 percent of all near except ever heard r. Is a mondegreen situation yeah I actually just looked up one of these yesterday because it was blinded by the light Ok. It just sounds like a douche. Apparently it's like a deuce but I always hear douche and that makes me laugh because that makes the lyric really funny. That's a great favorite word while you're figuring out what you're you know alternate favorite word I'll give it some thought sounds good. Katherine Connor Martin is the head of u.s. Dictionaries at Oxford University Press Catherine thanks so much for being here my pleasure. And if you want to know more about the origin story of the words and phrases we've talked about from like to red states and blue states to of course mondegreen we've got it all for you at our website innovation dot org Thanks to the people who helped put together this show senior producer Elizabeth Ross producer Mark Sunder associate producer Sarah Leeson and engineer Doug Sugar's We also had production help from Eleanor ho from p.r.i. And radio I'm Karen Miller and this is innovation hub support for innovation hub comes from Northeastern University you can learn more at Northeastern edu and from the Museum of Science in Boston working to push the boundaries of what's possible. Our Public Radio International. Confidence is great but sometimes it transforms into something else so the problem with ego is this sense of like I'm the best there ever was of course I alone can fix it but then the reality of actually having to do that is a totally different thing I'm Kara Miller ego and why there's a benefit to overcoming it next time on innovation hub. Recognizes the nonprofit community support of rogue Riverkeeper Riverkeeper is proud to celebrate 10 years of clean water defense at the wild and scenic Film Festival Nov 8th at the historic Ashland armory the wild and scenic Film Festival combines filmmaking cinematography and storytelling to inspire and ignite solutions to restore the earth and human communities Riverkeeper 7th annual wild and scenic Film Festival begins with the happy hour food and silent auction from $5.00 to 6 30 pm and presentations and films run from 630 to 9 30 pm. Tickets and information are available online at Rogue River Keeper dot org. This is the news and information service of southern Oregon University's Jefferson Public Radio 12 30 am k s j k talent and 9 30 am k a.g.i. Grants Pass also heard in the road Valley at one o 2.3 f.m. News of the region the nation and the world. From the Center for Investigative Reporting in p.r. X. This is reveal. More has been compared to Sherlock Holmes she's a powerhouse in a new crime cracking technique that combines d.n.a. Science with family histories for any type of human identification there really isn't anything more powerful than genetic genealogy she helps police catch murders who have alluded cops for years she says you have a match I just screamed we got him but this is new technology creating a d.n.a. Dragnet It's almost as if we turned the whole concept.