An Interview With Dr. Elizabeth P. Archibald: Ask the Past

Dr. Elizabeth P. Archibald of Ask the Past has delved deep into old manuscripts to find pertinent and impertinent advice from the past. In this interview, she discusses the history of how-tos and her new book.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Build it Beautiful. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History
Class from works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

(00:24):
I am Trazy Wilson and I'm Holly Frying and we
have a guest on the show today. We are talking
to Dr Elizabeth p Archibald. She is the author of
Asked the Past Pertinent and Impertinent Advice from Yesteryear, which
started out as a blog just called Asked the Past.
If you're not familiar with it, it's this collection of
tidbits drawn mostly from medieval and early modern works, mainly

(00:45):
written in Europe, with a little brief commentary to And
this focus is really because of Elizabeth's focus and interest
in this time and place in history. We could foresure
talk about advice from the rest of the world and
the rest of history too, and if you're interested in that,
uh that the same same sorts of things we're going
to talk about today also make an appearance in our
episode on Say Shanagons Pillow book from the hay On

(01:08):
era in Japan, so advice is not limited just to Europe,
but that is Elizabeth's focus. So and some of this
advice is uh, flat out odd ball. The very idea
that somebody ever thought you might need to know or
tell someone how to trim your toenails underwater is a
little bit strange. There are also some really weird recipes.

(01:30):
There's one from five a recipe for making a sort
of snail based limbus, which apparently is like a theme
through our show Everything is like limbus, and another one
from sixteen sixty about making a giant egg as big
as twenty eggs out of twenty eggs with other assorted ingredients.

(01:52):
It's like a giant Japanese robot situation, but with eggs,
where they all come together and make a super egg.
There are other how to use in this book that
started making sense, but then they take this almost surreal turn.
So there's, for example, this six fifty advice for singing.
A singer should not sing through the nose. Sure, that
makes sense. He must not stammer lest he be incomprehensible,

(02:14):
So right, that works too. He must not push with
his tongue or lisp, else no one will hardly understand
half of what he says, so all this is still common,
valid advice. But then it says he should also not
close his teeth together, nor open his mouth to wide,
nor stretch his tongue out over his lips, nor thrust
his lips upward, nor distort his mouth, nor disfigure his

(02:35):
cheeks and nose like the long tailed monkey, nor crumple
his eyebrows together, nor wrinkle his forehead, nor roll his
head or eyes therein round and round, nor win with
the same, nor tremble with the lips, et cetera. Doesn't
that sound like the most pers nickety music teacher on earth? Yes,
somebody needed to put that in a book. And yet,

(02:56):
even with these silly and weird and whimsical and sometimes
frank dangerous uh bits, like training a cat to fire
a pistol, what you shouldn't do that? Or making bird muscles,
which is a thirteenth century invention, Sometimes it's reassuring that
people have wanted to know how to lose weight and
attractive partner and avoid acquaintances they don't want to see
for hundreds of years. So John H. Young sark One advises,

(03:21):
if you want to avoid an acquaintance looking away and
not making eye contact. That it's pretty basic. Yeah, I
guess that's Sydney. I hope they don't see me kind
of arena. But with all this in mind, I cannot
wait to hear your talk with Elizabeth, who pulled all
of this crazy stuff together from hundreds of years worth
of advice and books. Yeah. We've had several episodes lately

(03:43):
that you recorded while I was not in the room,
and this one I recorded while you weren't here, So
sighting twists. Yes. So today I am talking to Elizabeth
p Archibald, who is the author of Ask the Past,
Pertinent and Impertinent Advice from Yesteryear, which was also a blog.

(04:05):
Thank you so much for agreeing to be on the show, Elizabeth,
Thanks for having me on. So. I enjoyed this book
a whole lot. It's it's little snippets of advice from
the past, along with your commentary and artwork. Uh. It's
really funny and sometimes also weirdly touching. And it took
me about twice as long to read it as I

(04:26):
planned because I kept texting holly hilarious things that I
found in it. Um, can you tell us how all
of this started. How did you get into this chronicling
advice from the past. Yeah. Um, So my academic research
deals with the history of education and the history of
the book. So I am interested in asking questions like

(04:49):
what sort of advice people thought it was worthwhile to
put in writing, what kinds of things should be taught
by a book rather than by a teacher, and what
kinds of things it was a it was possible to
learn that way. And so I was teaching a course
at the Peaboddy Institute of Johns Hopkins University called how

(05:10):
To a History of Instruction, which I designed around the
idea that you can look at classic historical texts sort
of through the lens of the how To manual, so
Plato's republic As how To Manual and Machiavelli and so on.
And as part of this course, we've spent a lot
of time in the George Peabody Library looking at its

(05:33):
rare books collection, and the stuff that I turned up
was just great. Um. A sixteenth century book about swimming
that included advice on how to trem your toe nails underwater. UM.
Seventeenth century conduct manuals, eighteenth century books about how to
get rid of rats Um nineteenth century guides to palm

(05:58):
Reading UM. And at that point that was when I
began posting material to a blog. I just realized that
the world needed to know how to trim your tone
nails underwater in the sixteenth century. And the blog developed
an audience, and soon I started getting questions from around
the world, like how should I impress my boss, how

(06:20):
should I wash my hair? And it just sort of
went from there. So did did you notice any trends
in the sorts of things that people thought were worth
writing down instructions on how to do? Yeah, it's it's
really interesting. Some types of how to manuals and books
of advice are really actually pretty similar now to their

(06:42):
predecessors from centuries ago. UM, and in some cases the
actual advice even sort of remains in circulation. Etiquette handbooks
are one category that come to mind. UM. Jovanni de
la Caza's Galato is a really foundational text for the

(07:02):
history of etiquette, and that's one that was translated and
imitated almost immediately. UM, and the advice from that book
just sort of stayed in circulation. So instructions about how
to blow your nose politely? You know, use a handkerchief
and then UM, when you're done blowing your nose, don't
open the handkerchief in front of people. This sort of thing.

(07:24):
U And that was interesting because um, an early French
version of that text was translated into English, and then
that became the basis for a set of etiquette rules
that were copied out by George Washington when he was
sixteen years old or something. So it's sort of interesting

(07:45):
how some of these things actually just stick around, you know,
responding to universal human desires to know how to blow
your nose properly. I guess, um, there are a lot
of books like this. They just sort of repeated I
used over long periods of time. There's a book by
Thomas Lupton from the sixteenth century called A Thousands Notable Things,

(08:09):
and that one amazingly continue to be published in new
editions into the nineteenth century. UM. And then there are
things like UM plenty of the elder suggested violets as
a hangover cure. And I when when I posted this
on the blog, I actually heard from some people who said, oh, yeah,
you know, I've heard that too. I've tried it works, okay,

(08:32):
UM or Old Lives tales like the recommendation to put
butter on your cat's feet to keep it from running away,
or the notion that um, a pregnant woman who takes
a step first with her right foot is carrying a boy.
These pieces of advice, you know, are around from the

(08:54):
ancient world, and they're still sort of sticking with us,
So that's interesting to they. And it also seems like
the the general perception, not necessarily of people who have
really studied medieval life, but the sort of common perception
of the medieval world is that it was a gross, dirty,
mannerless place. But your book actually has a whole lot

(09:15):
of medieval manners in it, Yes, lots of manners um.
I think etiquette in particular is sort of an interesting
story because people who who know about the history of
etiquette think that it sort of began in the Renaissance
with Jovanni Dela hasa But in fact, there are a
lot of etiquette manual sort of conduct books from the

(09:36):
Middle Ages that are articulating these important principles of cleanliness
and politeness and things to do and not do at
the dinner table, and what types of animals you're allowed
to bring into the dining room and what types you're
not and all of that stuff. I like the one
about I think this was later than that, but the

(09:56):
one about leaving a party and not bringing your horse
into the hall unless you are instructed. But it's okay
to have your horse in the hall, yes, which is
excellent advice for a party even today. So let's take
a little break from this interview, Holly, I am delighted

(10:17):
to learn this idea that you should put butter on
your cat's paws when you move so that it doesn't
get lost goes way back in history. Yeah. I have
heard that advice for hairballs, you know, to help your
cat pass a hairball or cough one up, but never
as a trekking option. But it seems sort of brilliant
and possibly delicious. And the idea is that you put

(10:37):
the butter on the cat's paws and let it walk around,
leaving buttery tracks in your new home. But then it
will lick the butter off it's pause and get the
scent of the new place and not run away. That
is this idea that apparently has been around a really
long time, which somehow you cat lady have not heard.
But I cat lady have no, it's pretty ingenious. There's

(10:57):
a logic to it. Yeah, although I picture my very
chubby cat Mr Burns just sitting there and licking all
the butter off anywhere. But we are gonna actually, uh
take a brief word from a sponsor before we hear
the rest of this charming and really interestingly informative interview.
So let's go do that real quick. So for the

(11:19):
next portion of this interview, we are going to talk
a little bit about Elizabeth's process and making this book,
and then we will get into some of the oddity
that is involved in all this old advice. So you
have so much advice that's been gleaned from so many

(11:41):
places and over such a long span of history. What
was your process like for winnowing all this down. Yeah,
it's such a fun process. I mean really, it's it's
just so lateful to be able to look at old
books and sort of page through them and um by
these fascinating little pieces of advice and kind of um

(12:04):
track down leads, you know, if I find a reference to,
you know, an ancient technique for pet to removal, and
being able to just sort of look around until I
find something interesting Um, it's really great, and I'm very
lucky to be situated, uh in a in a nice

(12:26):
rare books collection at the George Peabody Library, UM, where
I can do a lot of that. But then, of course,
these days a lot of material has been digitized too,
so there's just so much stuff that are fingertips now
that it's possible to dig into medieval manuscripts at a
moment's notice, which is really exciting. So I found myself

(12:49):
being very envious of your time spent in rare book
collections while working on this book, because there there's so
many cool gems in rare book collections from around the world.
Did you have any just awesome discoveries as you were
pouring through these very old rare books to work on
this Yeah, absolutely, And I mean it's it's such a

(13:12):
quirky project to um. You know, it's it's really fun
to be able to look at the old books, but
it's also sort of funny to be in these very
serious libraries and you know, looking at old hangover cures
or um, looking in medieval manuscripts to try to find
the best illustration of a cat looking its rare end

(13:35):
and that sort of thing. So that's that's been fun
as well. Well, yeah, and I had I had sort
of I had noted almost for the end as an afterthought,
that the process of getting artwork to accompany all these things,
But that's that's Actually there's as much artwork in the
book as there is text. So did you feel like

(13:57):
the process for going through all of these uh instructions
compared to the process of finding artwork that that went
with it or was that a different experience? Well, I
mean it was in some ways a different experience. It
as much as I wish that each one of these
pieces of advice was illustrated, um, because in some cases

(14:19):
I think the results would be pretty fascinating, Um, they
don't all have illustrations. And yet it was sort of
important to me to be able to offer something from
the right time period that at least evoked the right technique.
And that was a fun process as well, just sort

(14:39):
of um, thinking of the right genres of book that
would have illustrations of, you know, people with union brows
and that sort of thing. So that that in and
of itself was just sort of an adventure in rare
books collections, one of the things that you wrote about
in the introduction to the book was about how it

(15:00):
got to the point that it was hard to distinguish
sometimes between parodies of instructions and actual instructions because some
of the instructions themselves are so weird. Uh. Are there
examples of ones that you either left out because they
definitely were a parody or ones that are in the

(15:21):
book that you're not quite sure if that was an
actual instruction or making fun of this whole uh genre
of book. Yeah, it's it's so interesting, I mean, it's
it is actually very difficult some tends to know how
serious the text is, whether the past is sort of
pulling your leg a little bit. Um. In some cases

(15:44):
it's pretty clear. There are some parody recipes, um, where
it's actually pretty clear that it's a parody, so they
call for ingredients like, um, goldfinches feet and the sweat
of a pebble and these kind of made up things,

(16:05):
so that's a good cue. Um. On the other hand,
there are recipes that are apparently serious that call for
some some pretty strange ingredients. UM. So you know, when
you keep seeing the goal of a weasel, you start
to wonder at a certain point how serious it is.
But Um. In most cases, I think the outlandish ingredients

(16:28):
are serious. Um. Then there's the problem of I mean,
it's not really a problem that you will encounter texts
that just sort of have a funny tone to them,
these authors from the past who are being a little
bit ridiculous in the presentation of their advice. And I
think that is what's going on in one selection from

(16:50):
the book on How to Give Birth from the fifteenth century,
where the author recommends that women who are in labor
should squeam a lot so that everyone hears them and
feels petty for them, and then we'll bring them um
roast chickens and fine wines in order to make them
feel better. You encounter that too, you know, just these

(17:14):
sort of funny authors who are enlivening their serious advice
with a little bit of playfulness. Circling back to the
weird ingredients. As I was reading there, there are lots
of things that call for things like pigeon blood and
lots of animal blood. Uh, And I was thinking, Okay,
that made me make sense if people were eating a

(17:35):
lot of pigeon as their diet, that they might have
pigeon blood around. But then it would get into okay,
and now you need elephant dung, and I would think,
how am I getting elephant dung? That doesn't that seems
like it would be a little hard to come by. Yeah,
And I think what's going on there is, you know,
there are some ingredients that you use because you have

(17:57):
them on hand. Um. So that can be herbs in
the garden, and various types of animal parts and products, um,
you know, the beef blood and the weasel sad and
this sort of thing, um. And then there are things

(18:18):
that I think are supposed to have sort of an
aura of strangeness, and you know, you might sort of
believe in the efficacy of the recipe more because the
ingredients seems a little bit uh out of the ordinary. Um.
I think one example of that is recipes that call

(18:39):
for unicorn torn um. And nearly all of the recipes
that I looked at that involves unicorns horn sort of
acknowledge that this is not something that's going to be
accessible to everyone. It's expensive. Um. So if you have
the means to choires and unicorns for and then go

(19:02):
right ahead, and if not, then you can use this
other thing, that'll be fine. So some of the advice
that's in here seems so bizarre, but I wonder how
anybody ever thought that it would work. And one of
the things that really jumped out with me at me
is the one that was about killing the snakes by

(19:22):
luring them with crab cakes and then hitting them with rashes.
Yeah right. I have to say that I have not
tried this one, um, but if anyone has, let me
know how that turned out for you. Um. Yeah. The
radish does not seem to be seemed to me to

(19:45):
be the most obvious weapon to use against the snake.
I have to admit, why are radish? I think it
says a large radish. It specifically is a very big radish,
but if it's big enough. Another of the oddities that
that kind of jumped out of me is too jump

(20:05):
back to the idea of manners, is that a lot
of these pieces that are about etiquette are simultaneously written
in a way that we would consider to be rather rude.
So one of the very first pieces of advice is
is all about etiquette, and it's about not burping or
passing gas while you're dancing with a lady. But the

(20:25):
way that it's written, people would think that that's at
least at the very least very indelicate by today's standards. Um.
Did you often as you were working on this, find
this disconnect between advice that holds up, but a way
of discussing it that just seems off compared to what
we would expect people to talk about that way today. Yeah,

(20:48):
and I don't think that that's entirely a coincidence, um,
in the case of that particular text. Um. And this
is something that I find with how to manuals generally
for everyone where read the piece of advice and you
sort of scratch your head and you think, I am
not so sure about that. Um. You know, what's the
point of a how to manual whose advice doesn't actually

(21:11):
accomplish what it says it's going to accomplish. Um. There's
another one that actually does sort of more than what
it is presenting it face value. UM. And that's that's
one of them. And I think it's because it's a
Latin poem. Actually it's this is this is a poem

(21:31):
on dancing advice. Um. And not in the first edition
of this poem, but in later editions it includes the
sort of ridiculous comic advice about kind of the earthlier
aspects of the dance. And so that that piece of
advice about um, not eating onions before you go to

(21:54):
the dance and not burping, and you know, if you
have to sneeze, here's how you should do it. This
seems ridiculous, and it sort of is. I mean, I
think the intention of that is not purely too explain
to incompetent youth how they should behave at a dance,
but um, to entertain people who are reading this, you know,

(22:17):
it's actually a work of literature. And then in other
cases another advice on etiquette, I think sometimes just effective
presenting it in a sort of ridiculous way might help
to convey the advice a little bit more forcefully, um,
sort of make it more more memorable and kind of

(22:39):
shame you into behaving properly. Before we talk about some
of the modern parallels of all this weird old advice,
let's have another reef word from a sponsor. So we're
going to close out our interview with Elizabeth by talking
about some of the modern parallels to these old advice

(23:02):
and etiquette manuals, a couple of which I had not
considered at all. And we're also going to hear about
one of her favorite pieces of advice, which is one
that surprisingly holds up pretty well today, and then stay
tuned afterward on talking because we are going to have
some pretty important listener mail. When I before I started

(23:25):
reading this book, I was sort of expecting it to
be like a medieval slash early modern version of like
an advice column. But after getting to the end, it
feels almost like uh, medieval and early modern version of
men's and women's magazines today. It's it's like a collection

(23:50):
that that turns into a five hundred year old Cosmo
five hundred years from now. What kind of things do
you think people are going to be turning to two
to figure out the same sort of of weirdness about
how we lived at this point. Yeah, that's a great question,
I think. Um, it's true some of some of this

(24:12):
material does sort of remind me of magazines. Um. I
think the reason for that is, you know, it's responding
to me that we still have UM so for instance, um,
we're still on the eternal quest for brilliant little life hacks. Right, Um,

(24:33):
you know how to soap rab how to how to
make a cake when you run out of sugar, how
to overcome your fear of heights. Um. All of these
things you can find in seventeenth century books. Um, that's
all stuff that I think we would probably turn to
the internet for today, and a lot of categories. I
think that, you know, the internet has become our collective

(24:56):
how to manual. Yeah, and and now I had not
made that kind of action at all, But now that
you pointed out, some of the life packs that exist
out there are just as absurd as things in the book,
or like instead of instead of scrubbing your potatoes, put
them in the dishwasher. I think that's the most absurd

(25:16):
one that I could think about or think of it
at this at this particular moment. Do you have a
favorite of all these just delightful gems of odd and
sometimes touching advice. You have a favorite one of all
of them? Um? Well, I have a lot of favorites.
But um, one of my very favorites is about traveling. Um.

(25:39):
And this is from a work from the fifteenth century
uh by Santobraska, who wrote Died to pilgrimage to the
Holy Land, some sort of a common genre, and the
advice that he gives about traveling is not completely unique,

(26:02):
but I just really like the way that he articulates it. Um.
So he says that a traveler should have two bags
with him, and one of them should contain a lot
of money, and the other one should contain patients. And
I think that anyone who has ever gone through an

(26:22):
airport in the modern era has encountered that problem. You
really need to have your suitcase with patients. And then,
of course he else ha says that you need a
lot of cured tongue and ginger syrup in order to
settle your stomach while you're traveling. But but I really
like the suitcase full of patients well, and the ginger

(26:46):
to settle your stomach is one of those that carries
all the way through until today. I hear people recommend
that all the time, exactly. Yeah, So is there anything
else that you just you want to make sure that
the world knows about your book? I guess one thing
I'd like to add is UM just sort of the
idea of what a how to manual is um. And

(27:08):
I think in the Renaissance, which is sort of from
from my perspective at least, kind of the great age
of the how to manual Um, the thing that I
really love about how to manuals is that they offer
a kind of possibility. They sort of make this promise
that you can become someone new and it doesn't require

(27:31):
divine intervention or you know, a special status that you're
born with, or even ten hours of practice. You just
need this clever technique that the book is going to
teach you, and you know, maybe a few quirky household ingredients.
So you can read these books and find out how
to have blonde hair, or improve your memory, or become

(27:55):
a you know, smooth courtier or lover instead of a bumpkin.
And and that's what I think is really appealing about
how to two manuals, and it ties back to that
idea of men's and women's magazines and life hacks like
these things where if you follow these steps, your life

(28:15):
will be easier and better exactly, and you know, who
knows how many cases it actually played out that way,
but there's just such openers and in the genre. So
I would like to thank Elizabeth the Archbald again for
taking the time to talk to me. Her book asked

(28:37):
the past pertinent and impertinent Advice from Yesteryear is out
now it is delightful. Her blog is also delightful. Thank
you again for talking to us. Do you also, I
know you do because you mentioned it already, have some
important and interesting listener mail I do. We've gotten some
pretty valid uh corrections on the podcast lately. We got

(29:00):
a couple of notes after our episode about the Saint
KITT's Slave Revolt about how to say Nevus and Antigua,
which you say as I just said them, rather than
Nevis and Antigua, which is how we said them on
the show. But you have traveled there and you heard
most people that you spoke to saying Nevis, which is
why you presumed that was cool. I did not look

(29:21):
it up because I had heard so many people saying
them that way. What I have learned since then is
that because most of the people I was talking to
were ship's staff and ship's crew, and a lot of
them their first language was Dutch or maybe Hindi, or
maybe they were from the Caribbean and had a like
a Caribbean various Caribbean accent. Those accents affected that pronunciation

(29:44):
and it didn't quite translate to how we say it
in English in America. So that to be fair is
one I did not look up. Uh. The other one
we have gotten possibly the most email about of any
correction ever. In the correction Olympics ranks high. It's quite high.
And most of these letters were kind. Thank you for

(30:06):
the most of you who were kind. However, most of
them were also incorrect. So this is our episode recently
about the Texas Revolution, which that we took. We talked
about a siege. A lot of the corrections we got
our analogous too. If we had done an episode about
uh uh Juan Ponce de Leon, and then the entirety

(30:31):
of Atlanta wrote to us to say, it's Ponsta Leon right,
which is how there's for those of you who don't know,
there is a famous road here in Atlanta. Our offices
in fact are on it, which everybody here calls Ponst
Leon right, which when I first moved here it made
my stomach hurt. But right, that's not how you say
his name went in Rome, but you know, centuries later

(30:54):
that is how people say the name of the road
that was named after him. So what we should have
said d in our siege episode about the Texas Revolution,
we should have called it the siege of Beijar. We're
going to talk about why with two different pieces of mail.
The first of them is from my friend Hayden from college,
and he uh, I'm not gonna read the whole thing

(31:15):
because it was a note to me, not to the podcast,
and he said Texas history, particularly the period of the revolution,
can be a real mess, so it was nice to
hear a clear summary of the events. I have just
a couple of comments. First, the pronunciation of Behar when
speaking of the village of bejart As is as it
was generally known during the colonial and republic periods. The
generally accepted pronunciation is Beihar. In modern Texas, the city

(31:37):
of San Antonio is in Bear County, and the residents
they are pronounced it Bear. You also mentioned that Texas
independence was declared March first, thirty six. It was actually
declared March second, which was Sam Houston's birthday. I don't
know where the second air came from, so that was
that was Hayden on how to pronounce Behar. I also
got a great email from Samantha. Samantha says, I've been

(32:02):
listening to the podcast for years, hoping to hear something
that could spark and excuse to write in and I
finally have one, but unfortunately, instead of a cute story,
it's a slight correction. I appreciate your caveat at the
top of the cast regarding the improper pronunciation of the
rold are at the end of bey heart, something few
people who did not learn the correct malformation to pronounce
that particular sound as a child can accomplish. However, the

(32:24):
rest of the word is also mispronounced, and then she
has like this slanty face in moodicon with the like
slightly frown email. I have to start by admitting I
am not a native Spanish speaker or a linguist, but
I did grow up in San Antonio, and I took
Spanish and German in high school. And the proper pronunciation
of Bear County, where San Antonio is located, was discussed

(32:46):
several times as an example of the influence of the
linguistic traditions of the region's main cultural groups on our
modern pronunciations of traditional words and names. The original word
by heart, being Spanish, was most likely announced behar, treating
the the x like a J to sound like ye,
yea or ha. We can see this in the original

(33:08):
pronunciation of Texas as Taijas, and in the correct pronunciation
of Wahaka, a word I love to see non Spanish
speakers struggle to pronounce in Mexican restaurants. My language teacher
always explained that that beijar pronounced beijar softened to bear
under the influence of Germanic language traditions, which came in
with large numbers of German immigrants to the area, settling

(33:29):
towns like Fredericksburg and New Bronzels. And I should have
looked up how to say that before I read this letter,
but I didn't. In fact, until about thirty years ago,
a form of German was still spoken by elderly native
born residents of these towns, much like Creole is still
spoken in small parts of Louisiana, and some people even
thought the word was actually German in origin but rewritten
in Spanish. I think the memory of this story, as

(33:52):
well as spending a lot of time in St. Louis
and New Orleans, where the mix of French, English, Spanish,
and Native American languages have created some very interesting pronunciation
standards that are seemingly at odds with traditional correct pronunciations
turned into a dilettant fascination with the evolution of language. Uh.
And then she actually then she actually recommends um an

(34:13):
audiobook of the Great Courses, The Story of Human Language,
which is a full semester's worth of classroom lectures about
the evolution of language. Um. And then she says that
said she was really great that we did the episode.
So here's what happened. I looked up how to say
beijar at four vo, and we got the Spanish version.
We got the Spanish version thinking it would be more

(34:35):
correct to the place and time. We were talking about
the Spanish language pronunciation of bejar at four vo. When
we looked at it was wrong, Like it was frankly wrong. Um.
And because you know T e x a s has
pronounced Texas Yenglish and and M e x i ceo
was pronounced in Mexico and English. And the fact that

(34:57):
I have never studied Spanish beyond I think a semester
in third grade with yeah or maybe a quarter. It
was a very small amount of of third grade Spanish,
where we mostly learned numbers in the alphabet. Uh. It
did not occur to me that that was wrong. So
I'm sorry I messed that up. However, everyone who angrily

(35:19):
wrote to us, Uh, we got an email that literally started, um,
it's pronounced bear, like, don't don't, don't write to anyone
like that. It would not actually have been correct to
have called that town bear, but it also was not
correct to call it Bexar, which we should have called

(35:39):
it Behar. And just as a public service announcement, Uh,
most of you were nice. Thank you so much for
most of you being nice, But like, just in general,
as a general rule, if you're if you're writing to
anyone in the world to correct something they have done,
imagine that you yourself have just made a large and
and and irritating an upsetting air in front of literally

(36:01):
thousands of people. Kind Of imagine how you would feel
about that before you write your email to yell at
them about it, and know that you're one of thousands
of people doing something. Yeah, we got literally hundreds of emails.
My my, I mean, I don't. People are welcome to
couch their complaints anyway they want. I'm not there the
boss of them. My thing that is always like when

(36:23):
people start something like that and it's my ears bled
and I cried and I'm like, okay, Nobody on this
podcast is like, let's make some mirrors bleed today. We're
going to really rock this. You know, I don't want
to hurt anybody with mispronunciation. It is an accident, always right.
Neither of us are ever like I don't care, just saying, however,
you well, and to start of give you a little

(36:43):
behind the scenes, behind the scenes of stuff you missed
in history class. The level of effort that we take
to find correct pronunciations just does not correspond to a
reduction in how many corrections we get about it. It
does regardless of what steps we take. Like for example,
he gave the say Shanagon outline that I took for

(37:05):
the episode we mentioned at the top of the show. Coincidentally,
we gave it to someone who spoke Japanese and has
lived in Japan, and that person gave us phonetic pronunciations
for every single word in it. We still got pronunciation
corrections for Japanese. Or our Treaty of White Tangy episode.
I looked up documentary footage of New Zealanders talking about it,

(37:27):
and then then we imitated that, and we still got
corrections about that. So regardless of whether we're talking about uh,
accents of English that are not American English, or words
in languages that we don't speak, Like, regardless of what
steps we take, we still get things wrong. Sadly, we
cannot speak We don't speak all the languages, and Bracy

(37:49):
has more Spanish training than I do. And when it
comes to weird regional pronunciations, what these are actually good
for is separating who's from here with who's not from here,
and we're not from there. Uh, And we're gonna do
our best, but we are seriously always going to get
stuff wrong regardless of what effort we take. Yeah, it's
just kind of um comes with the package. Somebody suggested

(38:12):
asking fans on Twitter, and I was like, this is
that's an idea, but that like we don't have a
way to figure figure out which responses are legitimate and
which ones are people trolling us, and like regional pronunciations
can be so wacky, but it's hard to tell the difference. Well,
and even when we've done episodes and gotten really irate corrections,
they have often come in with like seven different options
about they are not all in agreement either, So at

(38:36):
that point you're kind of opening a can of worms
of like, let's start a Twitter fight over how things
are bron again. I don't want to do this podcast
to cause violence or unrest or make people's eyears lead
with our with our pronunciation. I don't want any of that. Yes,
So thank you Samantha for writing, and thank you Hayden
for writing, and thank you all the other people who
sent us nice corrections, and thank you to the people

(38:58):
who sent us main corrections to for taking the time.
Uh some of the things that I answered, I'm sure
I sounded frustrated and discouraged because I had answered literally
fifty mean emails that day. Yeah, by the seventieth time
that you've been told in like a three hour period
how terrible you are and that like you are killing

(39:18):
the universe with your evil, poorly pronounced words, it's hard
to maintain, Like, Hey, how you do him? Thanks so much.
I'm really I'm really sorry. I'm so I'm actually mortified,
frankly still that we got that so spectacularly wrong. But
it should not have been there, based on when we
were talking about it should have been by hard anyway.

(39:40):
So thank you so much to everyone who who correct
us on that. Please don't correct us anymore. We got
it now. If you would like to learn more about
what we talked about today a p M two our
website which is missing history dot com, and you will
find show notes, including the note where we corrected that
pronunciation the day of the episode came out. You can

(40:00):
also find a whole archive of everything we've talked about.
You can go to our parents company's website, which is
how stuff works dot com and find out all kinds
of stuff about etiquette. We have a whole collection of
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(40:21):
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