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The Current Transcript for December 23, 2019

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: When we talk about Italian traditional espresso coffee, we talk about democracy. We can make societies in front of a little cup of coffee.

NIL KOKSAL: It is a powerful little cup and it's not just the caffeine kick of a perfect espresso. The quintessential Italian pick-me-up is more than the bitter black liquid topped with crema. Espresso is layers of traditions and cultural cachet. At least that's what Italian politicians are arguing as they try to get espresso on UNESCO's World Heritage List. A little cup that could, coming up in half an hour for you. And way back in the 80s, Wayne Pearson who's from Calgary, was laughing out loud and ended up coining one of the Internet's all time favourite acronyms.

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VOICE: Instead of trying to type out really quickly, that made me laugh out loud. I just sort of typed "lol." That of course, he said, well what does this mean, you know? And so I told him and it just went from there.

NK: Just one of the many ways the Internet has forever changed our language, but have emojis and acronyms really enhanced English? We'll hear from an Internet linguist in an hour. But first, an emergency room emergency. I'm Nil Koksal in for Laura Lynch and this is The Current.

1

How Andrew Scheer’s resignation as Conservative Party leader changes the dynamics in federal politics

Guests: Margaret Fraser, David Urbach

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VOICE: I sat there for almost five hours, I think, and one of the nurses came out and said the doctor will not be seeing any more patients. We're closed now. I really couldn't believe it. It was very shocking.

NK: That's Greg McLeod. He's from New Waterford, Nova Scotia. The 57-year-old went to the emergency room at the Glace Bay Hospital last year because he thought he had shingles. But after being told the ER was closed, he had to drive 25 minutes to the next closest ER at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital.

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VOICE: I had to go to a different hospital and then there was a wait there as well. And I was also told I should have never been even sitting outside in an ER with other people with this condition. And it did turn out to be shingles. That was my introduction into the ER problems in Cape Breton. There's so many people without a doctor. They have nowhere to go. They have to go to the ER. And recently I went to the regional emergency room on a weekend because I couldn't get a hold of my doctor. I sat there for six hours and then I left and I sat beside a lady that was there for 12 hours and she had to be maybe in her 70s.

NK: Greg McLeod is certainly not alone in his experience with Nova Scotia emergency rooms. Last week, a report from the provincial government confirmed the problem is widespread, though communities such as Glace Bay are hurting more than others. The new report shows emergency room closure hours jumped 60 percent in the last fiscal year and the Glace Bay health care facility was open just 33 percent of the time. Dr. Margaret Fraser is the President of the Cape Breton Medical Staff Association. She's a family doctor who also works in emergency rooms in Sydney, Nova Scotia. She joins us now from our studio in Sydney. Hello to you, Dr. Fraser.

MARGARET FRASER: Good morning, Nil.

NK: How similar is Greg McLeod's experience to what you're seeing in Nova Scotia emergency rooms?

MARGARET FRASER: Oh, every word he said, I understood exactly where he was coming from. Unfortunately, in Glace Bay, North Sydney, a New Waterford, we have had to adopt a model where at a certain point there is a cut off and the physician doesn't see any more patients who have triaged. And they are told to go to other emergency departments because some of our physicians were ending their shifts at 6 p.m. and having to stay until midnight to clean up and take care of the patients who had already registered. So they adopted a system that was being used on the mainland at the Emergency Department. And so that has unfortunately led to some people being told after they waited for hours that they will have to go somewhere else. The waits at the regional hospital with the increasing number of closures that we're seeing in our community, emergency departments have skyrocketed. Our triage numbers have skyrocketed. We are seeing thousands more patients coming in through our doors than we did through a comparable 12 month period last year. So we've really seen it an entire uptick in the numbers. We don't have any additional space and we don't have any additional staff to deal with those people. So unfortunately, it's making for some very long wait times for the less acute patients.

NK: Let's start from a doctor's perspective. We're certainly going to talk about patients as well, but what is it like in that situation you've been describing, Mr. McLeod was describing to be a doctor in Nova Scotia's emergency rooms right now?

MARGARET FRASER: Well, it's extremely stressful because you're constantly thinking what is waiting in my waiting room that shouldn't be waiting, who is out there, who may be getting sicker, who may decide to go home and come to Herm because they've just. I tried to go home. We know that we have had people go home and die. We know that we have had people go home and come back more acutely ill who if we had been able to see them 24 hours previously, would not have required an ICU stay, for example, or who may have had a better outcome if they had been seen during that acute period of the illness. But who simply couldn't wait any longer? Who, you know, became tyred, who became ill, who who suffered more acute pain and felt they simply had no alternative but to go home and try it another day. And that does lead to terms to the patients. So you're constantly thinking about that. The emergency department is chaotic. So you're always there's always a pressure to try and work faster. And there's always a concern that because of that pressure, you're going to miss something. You're going to be a little too short with the patient and get a complaint. So always at the back of your head there is that pressure to move faster. And there is that concern about what is in the waiting room.

NK: What kinds of stories are you hearing from the people on the other side, the patients?

MARGARET FRASER: Well, I do know of a case where a person chose to drive from Sydney to Baddeck, which is about an hour's drive from Sydney to go to the emergency department there with chest pain because they did not want to wait at the regional. And they then had to be rushed back to Sydney in an ambulance. Lights and sirens all the way over Kelly's mountain because they were, in fact, having a heart attack. I do know of a case of a person who was around my age, you know, in their 50s, who came in with chest pain. But because they had no acute changes on their EKG, because we do do an EKG for everybody who trilogies was sent out to the waiting room and suffered a cardiac arrest a short time later. It's devastating for the staff when that happens. It's devastating for the patient families because it's hard to explain why somebody who was, as we now know, having a heart attack was sent out to sit in the waiting room and die. So it's heartbreaking to watch these things happening.

NK: Tanya Penny is the senior director of Critical Care and Emergency Programs of Care at the Nova Scotia Health Authority. I want to play what she told our colleagues in Nova Scotia about the message they have for people in rural areas.

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VOICE: I would say that, you know, the emergency services system in Nova Scotia is never closed. We've got an excellent 9-1-1 service. We've got 8-1-1. We fully utilize telemedicine across the province. You know in the CEC, there's the nightline model from a physician or sorry for a paramedic and nurse model that are there to see people. And I would say that when the EDs are temporarily closed, those services are still available and transfers to other hospitals are always an option.

NK: That is staggeringly different from what I'm hearing from what you are saying and what Greg McLeod described. How adequate are these options for patients?

MARGARET FRASER: They are grossly inadequate. It's a very glib answer from the health department to say that one can always call an ambulance and call nine one one that comes with a cost both to the patient and to the system. So for the patient, the ambulance transfer is a direct cost to them. Although I understand the DHS will work out billing options with patients who can't pay and they will never refuse to transport somebody who has previously not paid a bill. But you know, that does mean that you're going to have collection ancients calling you because you chose to call an ambulance. So that is not a free service to the patients. And it's disingenuous to say you can simply call nine one, one and all your problems will be solved. If you come to a hospital emergency department by ambulance, you are not triaged as a higher acuity and you may still go and wait in the waiting room for 12 hours. And in addition to that, because we're transporting more patients from those outlying sites, from those outlying areas of the region, there are fewer ambulances available to respond to other causes. So I was stopped in a hospital hallway last year by a volunteer firefighter from the north side who told me some horrific stories about having to respond to calls of all the volunteer firefighter getting to an accident scene, calling for an ambulance and having to wait for over an hour for an ambulance to come. And meanwhile, he's watching somebody he knows get sicker. And in one case, somebody he knew very well died because the ambulance wasn't able to get there in time because they were busy transporting other people and because they were tied up at the regional hospital. Because when the emergency department is overcrowded, you also end up with ambulance, awfully low delays. So I've gone up there and seen as many as eight ambulances waiting outside the emergency department to offload their patients and they're not on the road picking patients up.

NK: The other issue is a shortage of doctors, as I understand it. So how did Nova Scotia get to this point?

MARGARET FRASER: Well, Canada, there is a Canada wide shortage of emergency physicians. So that's a starting point. Nova Scotia, under a previous NDP government, opened the physicians contract and took back things that had previously been negotiated. That was agreed to by the physicians because we were presented with a catastrophic picture and we were promised that the other health unit unions would be presented with similar options. Nobody else had that happen to them as it subsequently happened. And the other health unions were given better deals. So that was the first nail in the coffin of the current Liberal government has had a very confrontational approach towards physicians. Our last contract are fee increases. We're 0 percent 0 percent point 5 percent and 1 percent over the 4 years of the contract. So we actually lost ground in terms of compensation and we are now the lowest paid in Canada with the highest rates of taxation. It does not make for a very attractive practice environment, particularly for a young person coming out with a high level of debt. So in addition to that, when the Nova Scotia Health Authority was formed, there was a two year period when virtually no recruiting went on. So we've always had a fairly high turnover of physicians in this area. Two years of no recruiting led to a lot of outgo, but no inflow and so we got further and further behind.

NK: We should mention that the province says, you know, they've made an agreement with doctors. An increase of $135 million. They're adding 16 new seats to train more doctors at Dalhousie. But there are differing opinions. There was one doctor, Brad Wilson, who tweeted about this and said, you know, that there are too many essentially emergency departments in Nova Scotia. Should the province be looking at other less costly solutions?

MARGARET FRASER: Well, it is possible that some of those smaller emergency departments should close or should be re-evaluated and possibly changed to a different model. Cape Breton has a high concentration of emergency departments in the Sydney area because historically this was a coal mining area. And each of those communities that has a hospital had active coal mines and needed to have an hour and an E.R. readily accessible because at any moment they could have multiple. Well, injured people coming in from an industrial accident and the Sydney area had an active steel mill, which at one point was the largest steel mill in the British Empire. All of that is gone, but the hospital infrastructure remains. But when people don't have any other access to health care, there's one walk in clinic in the Sydney area, which operates for about three hours a day and doesn't operate some days of the week. And there are a high percentage of people with out family doctors, and they don't have anywhere else to go with the emergency departments. So if you close those local emergency departments, you're effectively cutting those people off from ready access to health care and they have to try to travel to Sydney. There's no not very good public transportation down here. And a lot of those people are older and not comfortable driving on the highways to get to Sydney. So it creates a very difficult situation in the outlying communities.

NK: Dr. Fraser, we have to leave it there. Thank you for your time.

MARGARET FRASER: Well, thank you very much for having me on.

NK: Dr. Margaret Fraser is the President of the Cape Breton Medical Staff Association. She's a family doctor who also works in ERs in Sydney, Nova Scotia. She was in our Sydney studio. Now, Dr. David Urbach has researched outcomes in large versus small rural hospitals. He is chief of surgery at Women's College Hospital and a professor at the University of Toronto's Departments of Surgery and Health and Policy Management and Evaluation. He joins us in our Toronto studio. Hi, Dr. Urbach. Good morning.

DAVID URBACH: Good morning.

NK: What's your reaction to what you just heard from Dr. Fraser?

DAVID URBACH: I think what you've heard is a very comprehensive description of a complicated problem, which is how to provide appropriate services to people in Canada, particularly those people who live in rural and remote communities. It's not a simple problem. If it was a simple problem, we'd have a solution for it. But like a lot of problems in health care, it's quite complex. And often there is no single solution that's practical and easy to implement. And we have to be very creative and have to work hard in a number of different directions to figure out how to appropriately provide services.

NK: And we're going to try to unpack some of those complicated aspects of it, but how common are E.R. closures across the country, beyond Nova Scotia?

DAVID URBACH: They seem to be a big problem, particularly in Nova Scotia. The issues regarding care in these smaller rural and remote hospitals take different forms in different parts of the country. In the western provinces, it's largely an issue of providing surgical services and small hospitals and providing obstetric care, particularly operative delivery like caesarean section as opposed to emergency department closures in other provinces. It's a question of how to keep small and rural hospitals open issues around consolidation and closure of entire hospitals. Whereas in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, it seems to be an issue of how to keep the emergency departments open and functioning, given that they don't have an appropriate complement of doctors to be able to staff them appropriately.

NK: Let's talk about that word and what it means in the hospital context: consolidation.

DAVID URBACH: So consolidation generally refers to either closing or combining a number of smaller hospitals and grouping them on to a larger hospital corporation under single governance or closing some of these smaller hospitals altogether. Often it's done for the purpose of efficiency because it can be quite expensive to run several independent hospitals, all with their own governance as well as their own inventory, procurement, all these things. So you get efficiencies and economies of scale and sometimes it just becomes too practically difficult to keep a very small and isolated hospital open, particularly in a modern era of health care, where health care becomes increasingly, increasingly complex, expensive and dependent on technologies that sometimes are very impractical to have in some very small hospitals.

NK: You hinted at this earlier, deliveries, obstetrics. When we think about the patients that are affected by these kinds of closures in rural Canada, the most, I think, of maternal health and pregnant women. Tell me a bit about what you're seeing on that front.

DAVID URBACH: So and again, this is a bigger problem and in the western provinces, but because of some of the complexities in providing obstetric care to high risk women who may require operative delivery or caesarean section, those services may not be readily available in some of these very small and remote hospitals. And what is happening sometimes are women in those communities and these are often indigenous first nations. Communities towards the end of their pregnancy will have to leave and move to a larger community with the regional hospital where there are these services available and essentially have to live there for a period of several weeks away from their homes, their communities, their family, which is again. Disruptive to to those communities and family structures where a generational renewal is quite important as well as being around familiar surroundings.

NK: Are there other patients that you feel are most at risk in these kinds of closures apart from pregnant women?

DAVID URBACH: So with that with that particular problem of staffing small hospitals and the issue here is having surgeons or obstetricians, anaesthetists who can keep operating rooms running, which can be challenging in very small communities in addition to women who are pregnant. The other big issue is emergency surgery. So there will be people in some very remote communities who are, you know, hours away from another regional hospital who develop emergency problems that may require treatment in a in an operating room or an intensive care unit or some other very technologically highly supported environment. And being able to adequately staff those hospitals with all of the people and technologies that you need can be quite challenging. So providing emergency surgical services like appendectomies, for example, or patients with, you know, complicated fractures or other types of emergency conditions can be quite tricky.

NK: And that really underlines the issue that certainly the obvious reasons why emergency rooms are importan, but are there other things that people may not consider about how critical an emergency room can be to an overall structure of a hospital?

DAVID URBACH: Yeah. So emergency rooms or, you know, if we can broaden the discussion ways of providing urgent care to communities, which may involve an emergency room, but could involve things like urgent care centres, other types of consolidated acute care departments that I think Dr. Fraser was alluding to as well are critical for communities, particularly in a lot of areas of Canada, where we do know that a fairly large proportion of the population doesn't have access to a family physician on a on a constant basis. And and that number varies from region to region. But we do know this is a big problem. Primary care is critical in the Canadian health system, particularly strong relation based, prime relationship based primary care. And for those patients who don't have access to a primary care physician, having access to these types of urgent care centres or walking clinics can be critical for them to be able to get health services when they need them.

NK: Just in the last couple of minutes we have left, how small is too small? The reality is there might be some communities that can't just can't support any.

DAVID URBACH: Yeah, and it's a good question. There are various definitions of what these small communities are. Typically, people think of smaller communities as communities with populations of less than 25 or 30,000 people and are fairly remote from another larger population centre, say a half an hour or an hour away. So the question of how small is too small is a very good one. You know, the challenge is how do you provide services to people where they live? And, you know, the the the options will vary depending on the problems. And I think we have to be very creative, particularly because Canada is a very large landmass. There's a lot of remote populations that don't have easy access to these larger metropolitan areas. And we do have to think very creatively.

NK: Just before we go, some fixes, some pilot programs are in the works.

DAVID URBACH: Yes. So there's a lot of different ideas. There are some concepts about how to train and attract physicians who will be happy to work in some of these communities. There are strategies around training nurse practitioners and other alternate care providers to be able to provide a lot of these services. Telemedicine in virtual care can be very helpful in providing people in these remote areas access to health services. None of these are solutions to all the problems, but they're all very positive and creative ways that we can look at the various problems that we have and try to improve the health care system for everybody.

NK: Doctor, thank you.

DAVID URBACH: Thank you.

NK: Dr. David Urbach is Chief of Surgery at Women's College Hospital and a professor of surgery at the U of T. He was in our Toronto studio. The CBC News is coming up next for you. Then we're going to talk to Megan Williams, a freelance contributor, about the cafes of Rome and Naples, espresso traditions. I'm Nil Koksal out and you're listening to The Current.

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Why some Italians are calling for UNESCO status for their espresso

Guests: Megan Williams

NK: Hello, I'm Nil Koksal, and you're listening to The Current.

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NK: Still to come, there's hardly any aspect of our lives that has not been changed by the Internet. And that includes our language. We'll hear from a linguist who's been chronicling the acronyms, emojis and more that have grown out of the Internet and into the way we communicate for good or for ill. But first, un espresso per favore.

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[Sounds from an Italian cafe]

NK: That's the sound of a busy Italian cafe. Well, earlier this month in Rome, a group of usually clashing MPs put their differences aside for an issue that bridges all divides in Italy: espresso. The group met inside the Italian parliament to announce they'd be putting forward the tiny cup of dark, bitter liquid for candidacy on the UNESCO heritage list. The same week though, another Italian group put forward their own version of espresso, the Neapolitan espresso, to be considered for UNESCO heritage status. This was an opportunity espresso lover Megan Williams could not pass up, so she ventured out into the mean streets of Rome and Naples and joins me now to talk about Italian espresso. Good morning to you.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Good morning. So most people think when they think of UNESCO, they think monuments, not necessarily beverages.

NK: I know beverages are not what springs to mind when when you think of safeguarding world monuments, but this is a specific UNESCO list, which is called the Intangible Cultural Heritage List. And there are already other comestibles that are on this list, including Neapolitan pizza, Belgian beer and even other kinds of coffee, like Turkish coffee. So earlier this month, I got invited to this press conference in the Italian parliament here in Rome, where a group of politicians from the populist to the centre left to the far, far right, all sat in a row and announced this push to get espresso put on that list. But it's important to note that they're not just talking about the actual drink, but also about the culture and the rituals around it. Here's centre left MP Maria K.

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VOICE: And we need to have this fantastic beverage recognized as immaterial heritage of humanity. In Italy, coffee is sociality, it's tradition and it is a manner of production. So we need to distinguish Italian coffee, traditional Italian coffee with other coffee.

NK: So it sounds like there are two things they want protected here. The actual coffee and how it's produced and all of the traditions as well that surround it.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, that's right. And, you know, I think it can be argued that it's actually the coffee rituals and the social fabric created by those rituals that are most important. But we'll talk about that a little later. First, I think it's essential that people understand just exactly what an espresso is. So brace yourself. I asked the head of the producers group, which is called the Consortium for the Safeguarding of Traditional Italian Espresso Coffee, what the requirements are to be classified as a real Italian espresso. Here's the answer I got from the head man Giorgio, who I cornered at a nearby cafe just after the news conference.

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[Italian speech]

NK: I'm hearing more than a few numbers there.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: You are indeed. So here we go. The espresso liquid has to come out of the machine in 20 to 25 seconds. Seven to nine grams of coffee beans has to go into each cup with a volume in the cup of 13 to 25 cubic centimetres in a warmed porcelain cup made by an Italian machine, operated by a person.

NK: The precision, the rules, what happened to a relaxing cup of coffee?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Oh, and yeah, it doesn't stop there. The coffee has to come from certain countries. It has to be roasted at a certain temperature, be of an acceptable blend. What Italians call Michelle Le of Arabica. Or a robust coffee beans.

NK: So we've got quality taste, temperature, volume and production.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yeah. And there's one more very important characteristic of espresso coffee, which is la crema. It's that frothy hazelnut coloured cream that sits on top of your espresso liquid for at least not two minutes. The rules say, but 120 seconds. And it has to be there to pass the test of being a real espresso at sort of your your visual proof that it's been properly made now. Jonathan Morris is a professor at the University of Hertz for Shi'a and he's the author of a. A bunch of fascinating books on coffee, including Coffee, A Global History. I caught up with him on his way to a specialty coffee fair in Milan. Here's his explanation about the special clamour on top of the espresso.

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VOICE: In 1948, Achille Ganesha basically pushing to manufacture the first machine that actually used a lever, which was kind of this sort of spring operated lever. So it was able to generate very high pressures that forced water down through the coffee. So that's the kind of expressing the water through the coffee at high pressure and that produced cream, this crema on top of the coffee. The ganja device became known as making Crema Cafe Cream Coffee. This whole new look beverage, the one with the cream on top.

NK: It's really interesting. So the espresso that we know today only really dates back to the post-war years.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yes, that's right. Coffee itself dates back much further in Italy. It probably came up through North Africa, through Sicily, but officially, meaning written documentation. It entered through traders from the Ottoman Empire into the port city of Venice in the late 16th century. And that's when the first coffee house opened in Piazza San Marco St. Marc Square, which is still there today. And initially it was a drink of aristocrats and artists. And then it sort of filtered down to the popular.

NK: What about cappuccinos?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Well, surprisingly, the cup, which, you know, goes back further. Here's Jonathan Morris again.

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VOICE: So cappuccino is actually an older word than espresso and really is the first version of a white coffee in italy. We know that the reason that we call it seen a cappuccino is this notion of the milk blending with the coffee each create colour that that's similar to the habit of the carpaccio monks. So that kind of brown coal. Now, that is very much northern. And again, in each day it continues to be the case that you see very, very little milky coffee south of Rome. You wouldn't really see a cappuccino at any point. You know, it's not a traditional thing.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Now, an interesting cultural aspect of the cappuccino in Italy is the time of day that you drink at the most. Sure fire way to out yourself as a tourist in Italy is to order a cappuccino after dinner. No self respecting Italian would be caught dead drinking a cappuccino past, say, about 11:00 in the morning, noon at the very latest noted.

NK: I'm very glad I didn't do that on my first trip to Italy.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: But why is that? Well, Italians are very regulated and disciplined about what and when they eat. And they consider milk after a meal to be way too heavy for the digestion process, which they pay a lot of attention to.

NK: Smart. I'm curious. So what about you after all these years?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Well, you know, when in Rome, I would not have a cappuccino after lunch. But I I tend not to have them at all. Now, when I'm outside of Italy for the simple reason that in North America, at least, they've essentially become a milk drink, not a coffee drink. And I won't even get into Frappuccino and all the other variations if I do order a cappuccino. Even here in Italy, I order what Italians call a cappuccino scooter, which is a dark cappuccino. It has about a third of the milk that you'd get in a place like, say, Starbucks. And interestingly enough, about 80 percent of the coffee that Italians order is black. You know, the simple espresso, maybe a little bit, maybe a cafe macchiato, which is, you know, with a little sort of frothy bit of milk on top. But they really don't drink much milk with their coffee, whereas 90 percent of the coffee that people drink in North America is with milk. So so, you know, cappuccinos or light days or double doubles or whatever.

So what about the second part of this whole UNESCO bed, the cultural aspect of Italian coffee? How is that really different from coffee culture anywhere?

Well, to me, this is the really fascinating part of it, because living in Italy, I you know, I see how important the role that coffee plays is in maintaining what I think about as as, you know, this really rich and warm and vibrant social fabric here. I'll let sociologist Massimo Cerullo, who the Italian politicians have enlisted to bolster their case, the U.N. UNESCO case. I'll let him explain about what we mean when we talk about espresso culture in Italy.

When we talk about the Ceremony to Italian traditional espresso coffee, we talk about three key words: democracy, forms of sociability and generosity. democracy, because the concept of public sphere is born in the coffeehouse and born in front of a little cup of coffee. Public sphere is a public space where a lot of people can talk about several arguments without differences about classes, about culture, about the financial situation, about religion. the public sphere is a space where we can create forms of talk and forms of conversations to sustain our ideas. We can make societies in front of a little cup of coffee.

How is, though, Megan, what he's saying about bringing people together particular to Italy?

Well, I think the way Italians drink coffee at a cafe is very different from other places in the world. You know, in the Balkans or France, say there's that tradition of sitting and smoking and talking for hours and hours about you to do news or nihilism or something. And that's a kind of idea forming way of of of having your coffee. But in Italy, you have your espresso standing up at a bar. And that dates back to pre First World War when a law was passed that put a low cap on the price of coffee without service. So that's why Italians stand up at the bars. It's cheaper if they don't sit down at a table. And this is where a lot of tourists who come to Italy get trapped because the prices when the minute you sit down at a table, the price is triple. But if you stand up at a bar and they slide your your cup of espresso across the bar, it's you know, it's generally about a dollar. And that's also the reason why the vast majority of cafes in Italy are independents. There's just not enough profit in coffee to beauty to interest the chains. So it means it's also quick. You know, an espresso consists of two or three sips. You're standing up and then you're done. There's no reason to take a paper cup because, you know, you'll take two steps and your coffee is over. And the unintended consequence of this is that it provides a safe kind of pressure free place to socialize. You can chat with someone because, you know, this coffee is not going to last for 20 minutes. So you're not worried about keeping that conversation with a stranger going for a long time. You can chat with the young teenager beside you or the older woman, you know. And then it's buon giorno, buona giornata. And you're on your way. The cafes, as I say, they're not changed their family run businesses. So. So it's the same barista behind there who gets to know you. You walk in, they say chow by a large chow bear law. They sometimes learn your name. They learn what kind of how you like your coffee. But there is a cafe macchiato or in a glass or whatever. And all of those little things are really important. They're small, but they build a community. And I think that's what's unique to Italian coffee culture. Here's Jonathan Morris again.

We talk about something much more banal nationalism. There's little things that tell you that you're in a certain place and tell you that you were part of a certain community. And coffee, particular espresso. Coffee is one of those. You know, it is your it is your picture protagonist.

I'd like to think, though, Megan, that that can exist here, too.

Well, I think it can, and I think it does. And in some cafes. But as as Jonathan Morris points out, generally speaking, coffee chains in North America serve the inverse purpose. They allow people to come together without interacting.

Here's sociologist Massimo Cedillo talking about places like Starbucks:.

Because it is a space where I can write my books when I can text free Wi-Fi. Free Wi-Fi is a concept today is not common to concept of Italian espresso coffee.

You know, earlier when Mr. Cedillo was talking about the three key words that do describe espresso culture. He mentioned not Wi-Fi, but generosity. How does generosity fit into the picture?

Well, we need to move south in Italy to Naples for that part.

We have got picked out.

So here we are at this beautiful hipster. Cafe that overlooks this vast means square in Naples, Piazza Libby sheet, though that fronts the former royal palace. We're at the Grand Cafe Gambit Knows, which was founded in 1860. Picture elaborate Murano glass chandeliers, green marble topped counters, waiters wearing taxes and bow ties, a mouthwatering array of what he calls the stuffed sugar sprinkled Neapolitan pastries.

Well, the Italian just shipped let's there right now or I forgave my but bravos for you then.

So ten years ago again, Berenice turned 150 and wanted to celebrate. So they came up with the idea of reviving this lost or mostly lost Neapolitan tradition of the cafes suspense. So which in English translates into the suspended café, the suspended coffee.

Here's Gennaro, consequently the manager of emptiness, explaining that traditionally what we say when someone won at the races or a bet to celebrate their joy, they would buy an extra coffee for someone else, not someone they knew. It was an anonymous gift for someone who came by later and couldn't afford a coffee bar. So how does it work?

You just buy two coffee? Yes. Essentially, you go up to the cash, you pay for your coffee and then you say you'd like to buy a coffee. So special. And then the person behind the cash gives you the two receipts. And so you take the receipt for the second coffee, the cafe. So specimen you stick it in this case in this big cafeteria, a bronze coffee pot by the door. And did you actually see anyone buy an extra coffee? I did. You know, it's it's a lot of tourists who are doing it. They in particular like this tradition.

And while I was there, there was an Italian who came in Diego, but an Italian who lives in southern France, who heard about this on television or something. And he bought one.

I think it's a good thing because you think about somebody else, you know. And, you know, you're even a normal coffee, even a police lady. So you pay one year, one year of that grantee, which has nothing, basically. And you can pay another extra. You're 24, a person that cannot afford a coffee. A kind of, you know, we think about it. Is that the vision we live in?

Did you see anyone coming in to get a coffee so special? Yes, I did.

There was a 68 year old gentleman named Antonio who lives in a neighbourhood that's renowned a working class neighbourhood in Naples called Lasagne Tar.

He came in with his wife and I asked him how often he came, but she distributed nearly every day, not just because they got us a special coffee, but because it's one of the few places that still makes a decent coffee in Naples. I've had some bad luck in life, so I'm glad of this strategy. You should never have done so.

How widespread is this now? Well, in in practice, I don't think it's that widespread. A famous Neapolitan writer, Luciano, the coalition so cited cited this tradition in a book a few decades ago. And it sort of began to return then, but mostly in people's imaginations. I think the tradition actually doesn't even go back that far to post-war years when most of Naples was still very, very poor. And when I was down in Naples last week, I went around and I asked if I could leave a Café Suisse Masada at a scattering of different cafes and different kinds of neighbourhoods in Naples. And this is the kind of answer I got.

Coffey So spares no easy. Stay quiet. No.

That's you asking if you can leave one. Yeah. And that's that's the bar man saying no, no, no, we don't do that here. So I think the idea of the cafes for Spencer is very appealing to Italians and specifically Neapolitans to the way they want to see themselves as generous, which I do think is a quality of Italians expressed in coffee culture here. You know, for instance, when you go to take a coffee break with colleagues here, more often than not, you treat the person you're taking the coffee with. Or they treat you. And that's a pleasure and a joy that that just is part of everyday life here. I mean, it can happen in Canada, but it's not the norm. And, you know, that's a cultural difference. But I also suspect it's just an economic question, because here you're your coffee or your ass. But I saw your cappuccino is going to cost you not much more than a dollar, whereas, you know, some of some of these some some coffees and in Canada can go as much as five dollars depending on what you ask for. But in Naples, especially, there's another part of coffee culture that really takes centre stage and. This is it in a nutshell.

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[Italian speech]

NK: Rituality?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yes Rituality. That's Francesca Borelli, he's a regional politician and the head of the Neapolitan Coffee Group that's pushing for its own separate UNESCO recognition. Now I met, Borelli for an after lunch espresso outside of Gambrinus. And you know, he said his group is going a step further than the Italian Espresso UNESCO group, which says, as we've talked about, that. That they want to suppress a recognized for both how an espresso is made, but also the culture around it. But but earlier says that the Neapolitan espresso bid is really actually not about the coffee at all. That the coffee is just an excuse to celebrate and protect the Neapolitan culture around it. And Brandy says that coffee culture is very different in Naples, not only from the rest of the world, but from the rest of Italy.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It's not just about coffee rituals in cafes, but also Neapolitan home rituals. The rituals around our traditional coffee pots that we've transformed and elaborated in our homes. In Milan when people would come, they don't speak with anyone. They down their coffee and out the door. There are comedians who do skits showing how the Milanese get dressed and do four other things while drinking their morning coffee. In Naples, it's the opposite. It's about relating to those close to you. It's about talking about what's new. If the Naples soccer team won or lost, the latest elections, what's in the papers? It's a moment of conviviality.

NK: It's that North-South divide again. So these two groups are now competing for UNESCO recognition.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, they are. I mean, we'll see what happens. Borelli assured me that he was going to reach out to the other expressive group and see if they cooperate. But, yeah it's been a couple weeks and so far they're not talking.

NK: What happened to coffee bridging the divide. My goodness. But in all of the talk about Italian coffee culture in the UNESCO bids, I wonder, is there an economic motivation here? Oh, yes.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yes, there is. But but the economic motivation isn't within Italy. It's about Italian roasters or coffee brands feeling the squeeze from both both the Nestlé capsules that have taken off around the world and what we can classify sort of as hipster specialty coffee. And so Italian espresso producers want to claim their position as the originators of the espresso culture throughout the world so that they can, you know, kind of claim some sort of supremacy in those markets. I'll let Jonathan Morris have the last word.

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VOICE: So the UNESCO nitiative is a way really of trying to get recognition for that culture, which they hope will enable them to maintain their position, not just in the Italian market, but also in the world market, because obviously that's where the profits are to be made at this point.

NK: It's all fascinating. Who knew there's so much poured into that tiny cup of espresso?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Indeed. I sort of feel like we barely skimmed the creamy surface. I mean, there's just there's so much culture in this little tiny cup of coffee.

NK: Fantastic. I have to say, though, I'm going to be so much more annoying or just exacting the next time I order an espresso or a macchiato.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Welcome to the club.

NK: Thanks so much, Megan.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Thank you.

NK: Megan Williams joined us from Rome. And there's more to see on our website, including videos and pictures from that cafe in Naples. That's at cbc.ca/thecurrent. Coming up in our next half hour for you, we'll be far behind with Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist who's paying particular attention to the myriad ways our language is being reprogrammed by the Internet. I'm Nil Koksal and you're listening to The Current.

[Music]

Back To Top »

In the '80s, this Calgary man invented one of the most common words in internet-speak

Guests: Gretchen McCulloch

NK: I'm Nil Koksal and you're listening to The Current.

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[Music]

VOICE 1: My mom gives me like the emoji with like the hearts and the smiley thing. I use the microphone emoji a lot. I think it's funny. The poo emoji.

VOICE 2: What about the crying face, the laughing crying face?

VOICE 1: Yes, that one's funny.

VOICE 3: I think I've always liked the dancing lady. She's like excited. So I use her when I'm excited. I use the fire emoji when I think something is cool. Sometimes if I don't know how to reply to someone I'll just use the hundred emoji a bunch of times and just end the conversation.

NK: Love them or hate him, it seems emojis are now part of our shared vocabulary as we communicate from screen to screen. And they're just another vivid example of how the internet and social media have changed our language. There are countless acronyms, LOL and TMI for starters, and the slightly more obscure codes such as putting a little squiggle mark next to a word to show you're being sarcastic. But is it all part of a healthy evolution for English? Or just a dumbing down? Gretchen McCulloch is an Internet linguist and author of the book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. She spoke with Laura Lynch from Montreal. And we first aired this interview back in September.

LL: Now we know language is always changing, but I'm wondering, has the Internet made it change more quickly?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: It's an interesting kind of yes and no to that because on the one hand, you know with the Internet a word can go viral, a word or phrase can go viral the same way that a funny video can go viral. So something can spread a lot faster, but on the other hand the tools that we use to interact with our devices that aim to help us write things, do that by predicting words that are already in their lists and that can make things more conservative as well.

LL: OK. So why is it interesting for a linguist to be tracking the way language is used online?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: One thing that's ireally interesting about the Internet is that it's this vast increase in how much writing an ordinary person does on an ordinary day. If you think about 50 years ago, the average person once you left school, if your job wasn't being a writer, you didn't necessarily do a lot of writing on a daily basis. You know the most you might have written might have been a grocery list or a postcard or something. Unless you kept a diary, you didn't necessarily have a reason to write. Whereas now we can barely organize a birthday party without writing.

VOICE 1: And what does that do for you as a linguist?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: So it's very exciting because linguists are interested in the subconscious patterns that we do in language without even thinking about it. And traditionally that's meant studying speech or sign because those come out without an editor or a filter or something that's interfering with those unconscious patterns. Whereas if you have an editor coming in and changing what you're doing, then that's got multiple hands in the pot and it's not as interesting linguistically. But with informal writing, when you again, don't have an editor and you're doing things just to communicate, you have that access in a greater way to the sort of unconscious, unfiltered type of communication, which is the most interesting in terms of trying understand how language works in the human mind.

LL: And it seems to me the research theatre for you in this respect is enormous.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: It's huge because analyzing audio is a real pain. You know trying to create an audio transcript, doing, getting people into a lab to do a high quality recording is a lot of work and being able to say oh well we've got this information already in text, it's already searchable. You can find bigger you know statistical patterns in many cases.

LL: So I'm curious to know how you go about doing the research then. Are you are you creeping people online? How are you getting your material?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Hopefully not creeping them too hard online. There is one vein of Internet linguistic research, which does look at sort of massive levels of data at like, so a certain percentage of people who use platforms like Twitter, will add a geotag to their tweets. They'll add the geographic location to that and you can download all of those tweets with their locations and make a map of where people are saying particular words here and there. So at a very large level it is kind of creeping people's data ,but you're not reading the individual tweets, so much as you're saying people in this area tend to say you know pop versus soda.

LL: That's interesting. So you are doing that. You're seeing the way people talk in certain areas on Twitter.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: So I don't do that type of research myself specifically, but it's enjoyable to cite those types of studies that do that.

LL: OK. So in order to help us understand the language of the internet, you've developed a bit of a breakdown of what you call Internet people, depending on the stage they became active on the Internet. What is it and why did you do that?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: One of the things that I was really interested in is that people seem to have different sets of expectations and different beliefs about what an unmarked way of talking online is and there are some age effects, but it doesn't seem to be only an age effect. Because if you take somebody who's say 40, 45 at the moment, they might have a very different experience of the Internet, depending on whether they were an early adopter, you know in the early 90s or whether they came on interest in the past five years, they finally started getting online more.

LL: So set out the categories for me then. What are they?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: So I talk about old internet people as the people who came online in this first wave before the Internet was mainstream. They came online to talk to strangers and they often were very open to adopting Internet terms. And then in this wave of Internet mainstreamization, you have kind of the older cohort in there and the younger cohort in there, which I call full and semi internet people and the full Internet people came online to talk to their friends because they wanted to connect to people they already knew. Some internet people came online to do tasks. You know to do online banking or you know buy airplane tickets or check the weather, check the news and not so much to communicate with people ibecause they already had friends offline that they were used to communicating with that way. And then you have this last wave of people that came online, which is in the most recent years, which are either you know the kids who just grew up, teenagers who just grew up with the Internet and totally take it for granted or people who are on the older end of the spectrum who were real resistors for decades and they're finally kind of gotten dragged kicking and screaming onto the Internet.

LL: All right well let's hear from an old internet person. We have some tape of one person from Calgary, Alberta and who is credited with inventing the expression lol as a teenager in the 1980s. Here is what Wayne Pearson told us about how that happened.

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VOICE: I'm sitting in my kitchen in my house. PC on the kitchen table just chatting away on a BBS, it's a bulletin board system and this was one of the first multi-line BBS is where instead of just posting messages, you could actually have multiple people on and so you'd have a chat room where people were live typing to eachother. A friend of mine was on there and you know chatting back and forth and he had said something so funny, that it just made me burst out laughing. It wasn't just enough to type hahaha into the chat to let him know I thought that was funny, which is what we would do if we cracked a smile or something when someone wrote something out. So I basically instead of trying to type out really quickly that made me laugh out loud, I just sort of typed lol. That of course he said well what does this mean, you know and so I told him and it just went from there and got adopted by the others in the chat room and in that system all around Calgary.

LL: And beyond Calgary as well. LOL is an interesting case study in how internet language evolves. Tell me about it.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Yeah LOL is really interesting because as you hear, we have you know Wayne Pearson in the 1980s saying I was actually laughing out loud, I needed a way to express this. But by as early as 2001, you have an Internet researcher, David Crystal, writing in his book, it's unclear how often people are actually laughing out loud when they type LOL. And so it became instead of being I am literally laughing out loud, a sort of aspirational laughter. I acknowledge this as funny. Maybe I wish I was laughing out loud or I would be laughing out loud, but I'm not actually doing so.

LL: And how are people using it now?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: You've got one step further, which is younger people especially are often using it as a marker of irony or softening. So not even just you know to indicate that something is a joke or to indicate something isn't to be taken seriously. So if you say to someone I hate you lol, that doesn't mean I hate you and I'm laughing about it. That means I'm joking about hating you.

LL: So am I supposed to be saying lul or lol.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: So this is another thing is that younger speakers often say lul for the expression and write it in all lowercase. I recorded my own audiobook for Because Internet ,which was a very interesting challenge to convey all of this punctuation and emoji and so on in audio form and what I ended up doing convention-wise for the audio book was when I had written it in all caps, I pronounced it LOL and when I had written it in lowercase I pronounced it lul because that was a kind of efficient way of doing that for the audio medium. Although I don't know if I commit to it more broadly than that.

LL: Okay well why is it important for younger people to use lowercase?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: All of the Internet acronyms, you know omg, wtf, btw, lol, all of those acronyms get written in lowercase by younger people. And that's been true for a couple decades at this point, partly because all caps has this other Internet meaning that is familiar to a lot of people of indicating shouting. So if you're going to write omg in all caps, it means that you're saying more emphatically and so you're indicating that you're shouting. And so if you're not shouting you need to write it in all lowercase.

LL: It also it just reminds me that some people thought LOL meant lots of love too, which starts to give you an idea along with what you said of the confusion this can cause. I'm wondering how problematic it is that people may not have a shared understanding about what something like LOL means.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: It can create problems. One of things that I was hoping to do by writing a book about the Internet and how we speak on it is encourage some more of these meta conversations because it's okay for different people to talk differently. It doesn't have to be one right way of doing it. You know just because I'm saying oh younger people tend to do this, doesn't mean if you're an older person you have to adopt that. But it also doesn't make people who do things differently from you wrong. It just means there are different things and it can be useful to have these meta conversations about what makes sense to you? Is this thing that you're saying, am I interpreting it the way you're intending it?

LL: So LOL, that's just one way to express irony or sarcasm and I'm wondering what are some other interesting examples of how we've adapted language to convey emotion online.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: There are a whole bunch even just within the irony domain. So some typographical signals of irony play with existing conventions for authority. So if you make something in capital letters you can indicate that it's a very important concept, even if you're only doing so ironically. You can hear I've had to develop ways of doing this in speech as well.

LL: But you'd hope you were always able to do that with speech.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Well yeah so speech we've made a lot of tools to convey irony in speech. You know scare quotes is another one that plays with the symbol of authority to you know add a note of irony to something. Another one that I particularly like is the sarcasm tillday. So this is the little squiggly symbol that's up by the one on your keyboard and this can use to convey especially a particular vocal inflection. So if you say something is so cool, that so, which you can do in the voice, you can convey sometimes by putting it before the word or around the word.

LL: Now one of the things I like about the book is I'm learning things I did not know about the sarcasm. I also did not know that punctuation at the end of a text may mean or lack of it, may mean things I don't mean it to mean. So talk to me about that.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: The issue of the period at the end of the sentence is really captured people's imagination at this point. So we have to take a step back and think about how you put a break between each of your utterances by default. So if you send someone hey how's it going, do you, you know, do you want to chat sometime maybe Tuesday? You have a couple different utterances there and you can break them up by putting each of them in a new line or each of them in a new message, which tends to be preferred by younger people. You can break them up by putting a period between them or a dot dot dot or a dash between them, which tends to be preferred by older people and any of these conventions would be fine. The dot dot dot and the dash and the period tend to be preferred by people who's learned their first writing conventions in a paper context because they're more space efficient on paper, whereas starting a new line is not very efficient when it comes to paper, but it's perfectly fine on a screen because you can scroll.

LL: It's so interesting because it just opens the door to generational misunderstandings and is that common?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Right. So what happens is not that either of these systems are bad, but when they come in conflict with each other to this younger generation that uses line breaks or message breaks, the period or the dot dot dot takes on this additional connotation of finality or something left unsaid.

LL: Now we heard a bit off the top of this segment about one form of internet language and that is emojis. Here's a little more of what our producer Danielle Carr heard from people in downtown Toronto about their relationship with the little pictures and graphics.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I can have an entire conversation using like only emojis.

VOICE 2: Like for flirting, the sad flace emoji. The tongue emoji.

VOICE 3: I think my favourite one is like the upside down smiley face.

VOICE 2: Yeah that one's funny.

VOICE 1: It can mean like so many things. It's like haha, screw you.

VOICE 3: I always use that one when I'm like low key mad about something, but I'm like It's fine. It's cool. I wouldn't have it any other way.

VOICE 4: What do you call them?

VOICE 5: Emojis.

VOICE 4: Emoji. And what is that?

VOICE 5: It's like you know the little graphics that people send in text messages, like a smiley face or a heart.

VOICE 4: Oh yeah.

VOICE 5: Do you use them?

VOICE 6: No we like writing. Oh no, no, no.

VOICE 4: We still like to write.

VOICE 7: We're from a different generation.

VOICE 8: Oh the poop one. It's like my all time mood because you could use it anytime.

VOICE 9: I don't really use emojis.

VOICE 10: Yeah I don't really use them either.

VOICE 9: Whatever kind of community. If you're in the community that uses a lot of them then you probably will use them more. Like if your friends use them then you'll probably use them more.

LL: I'm wondering what goes through your mind when you hear that bit of tape from what people had to say.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: The analogy that I like to use when talking about emoji is in terms of gesture. So there's a lot of ink spilled about oh emojis are going to replace language or something like this, but when you look at the data for how people actually use them, people tend to use emoji alongside of their words to add additional context to the words that they're saying. So if you say to someone good job and you accompany that with a thumbs up, whether that's a thumbs up gesture or a thumbs up emoji, you know that's reinforces the positive message. But if you say to someone good job and you company that with a middle finger, now suddenly you're doing something very different.

LL: Those are literal gestures.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Those are literal gestures, but I think it's not a coincidence that the most popular emoji are the hands and faces and hearts, which are often very literal gestures. But even some of the ones that aren't, don't represent specific gestures, you know the upside down smiley face. No one's standing on their heads you know smiling, that's not what that stands for, but it can have a similar role in communication as certain kinds of gestures. You know this kind of awkward smile or fake smile or pseudo smile or smile, but also you're rolling your eyes at the same time.

LL: And those who criticize emojis, they say well this is replacing language, but in fact there are historical roots for emojis. They've been around in one form or another for a long time.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Some sort of way of representing this kind of information has been around for a while, so the emoticon has its roots as far back as the 1980s. I looked at a number of vintage postcards when I was writing Because Internet and I noticed a lot of people wrote little doodles on their postcards. You know they wrote happy faces. They wrote, they drew flowers, they drew hearts.

LL: In medieval manuscripts too?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: So yeah medieval manuscripts had illumination on the big capital letters in front of them. It's really a printing press idea that gives us the notion that we shouldn't have pictures alongside words. You know wait why not have pictures alongside words? As long as the technology permits it, you know there's no inherent reason why a wall of text is superior.

LL: Well let's move on from emojis then. There's another internet language you're tackling in the book and that is the language of memes and here's where some of us may completely just say OK I don't get it. First off, can you explain what makes a meme.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: That's an interesting question. I talk about a meme as a unit of Internet culture. So it's something that spreads through viral replication. People make their own versions of a meme. People make their own riffs on a meme. People share it with their friends and beyond their friend groups and the most classic sort of example of visual means are things like lolcats, which are of these pictures of cats that have these weird looking captions on them. But and you know later generations of other pictures of animals that have other types of captions on them. You can have video memes that are you know people recreate versions of the same video. There's a you know a dance or something, you can recreate that. You could have text based memes where people say you know here's this funny sentence or paragraph or poem that I'm going to rewrite to be about a particular topic. So there's memes in all sorts of different formats.

LL: How big a divide is there though between people who get memes and the people who don't?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: It's an interesting question because there is a variety of ways of getting means. You know I don't know if there's anybody at this stage of the internet who gets all memes ever. It's more that there are a whole bunch of different niche subgroups that get certain sets of memes and not necessarily all of them. You know every successive generation of younger people claims that they're the ones who truly understand the memes, which is why I think of them as a unit of Internet culture or popular culture because every successive generation of young people also says that they're the ones who truly understand what it is to be cool. Who truly understand which music is actually good music now.

LL: This too has an evolution. You to explain the evolution of memes by telling a story of something called blinking lights. Can you explain that?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Yeah. So what was fascinating to me when I was doing meme research is finding that there was a history of memes or what we would now think of as a memes that goes back before the internet at all. And this goes back to a thing called photocopy lore or fax lore, which was people sending viral images to each other. You know comic strips, you know political cartoons, sketches, jokes about you know political leaders and sort of what you think of as classic jokes. You know knock knock jokes or you know like three people walk into a bar with different professions, this kinds of jokes and these got passed around using photocopiers, using fax machines, often between workplaces. They would get like you know stapled to bulletin boards because people thought they were funny. They would get passed from workplace to workplace. Blinking lights is a particular example of an early meme that was forwarded to me as a chain email and it's a mock German warning sign that's written in kind of, it's like a fake german english hybrid that's like this machine with the blinking lights is not for you know poking and prodding. I'm not going to be able do the fake german, but.

LL: I was looking forward to that.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: I need to have it in front of me. But you know you can't poke and prod it and you know just relax and watch the blinking lights, you know. And I came across blinking lights as a forward that I found very funny as a linguist. I was like ooh it's German. This is very funny to me. In the 90s, as an e-mail forward, but when I started of tracing it back historically, apparently there are traces of it that go all the way back to allied machine shops during the Second World War and it was posted above other kinds of fancy machines in World War 2.

LL: But we're on the cusp of a federal election in Canada and I'm wondering how powerful have political memes become?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: I think political memes are really interesting because you can also put them into a context of other types of you know political imagery, if we talk about you know facts lore and photocopy lore, political memes are a new version of the political cartoon. You know you in both cases you're trying to summarize a political issue, sometimes productively, sometimes to advance your own particular agenda, but you're trying to do that in a visual form where people can immediately grasp an issue and maybe agree with you or disagree with you, but they have this sort of concise visual version of an argument.

LL: So we've been talking in a fairly light-hearted way through about this use of language on the Internet and this may move beyond the scope of linguistics a bit, but when we talk about internet communication, I'm curious to find out how you feel about communication and language that has been so highly weaponized online. How it's used to spread information, how it's used to spread hate.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Yeah I think that's a question for a political scientist. I don't think that's a phenomenon that's unique to the internet either. You know you think about use of propaganda or rhetoric or you know use of language to convince people to do things, whether those things are good or whether those things are extremely terrible, that's you know the Internet is again the kind of the latest incarnation of that, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's unique in terms of history giving you know speeches that rouse people into doing things, whether those things are good or bad is still something that people use language for.

LL: Your book describes all these ways that people come up with to convey emotion and intention online and I'm wondering what your reaction is when you hear people complaining about how the Internet has degraded the written word or use of our language or face to face communication.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: I just don't think there is such a thing as like the English language going to the dogs. That's a overblown worry that has never been true and is not going to become true. You know there's you can just live so much better of a life by being relaxed and curious and interested in how other people use language differently from you and you don't need to be the guardian of English purity and the things that we now find annoying or find repetitive or find you know find new, in another couple hundred years people are going to look back and be really excited about those entering the language. Because when we look back a couple hundred years ago and we say oh that was really interesting, all these words, you know entered English from Shakespeare or from the Norman conquest. Like that was neat. You know here are all these cool things that we have now, which are great or here all these old words we don't use anymore, but like wouldn't they be cool? We have that attitude when we look back at the past, but we could also have that attitude in the present. There's nothing stopping us but ourselves in being delighted by language as it is now.

LL: So ultimately how do you think that the Internet has changed how we think about what language actually is?

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: What I hope that the Internet can do is give us a new metaphor for language because for a long time we thought of the English language as some sort of book, you know sufficiently contained in some sort of book. And the problem with the book and I say this in full recognition of the irony that I just wrote a book, is that it's a single authoritative text. And if you go scribbling in the margins, that can be perceived as degrading the book or changing the book or debasing the book. But what's more accurate to say is that language is more like a network. Language is more like the Internet itself and a network is constantly changing and that's a strength. A network doesn't stay the same if you step away from it. If you go off line for a week, it doesn't mean the Internet stops changing. And if you you know stop using English or if you go to sleep for 10 years and and wake up to English, English is going to be different because it's in the minds of living breathing people and that's what makes it interesting. And I think we can get really excited about that.

LL: Well it's certainly a book worth reading, so you can learn about things that certainly I didn't know about and think about what language is. Thank you for your time.

GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: Thank you for having me.

NK: Gretchen McCulloch is an Internet linguist and author of the book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. She spoke with Laura Lynch in September. That's our show for today. Stay tuned to CBC Radio One for Q. Dawn Ferguson and Luba Goy of the Royal Canadian Air Farce, will join guest host Ali Hassan to talk about their last show ever, which is coming up next week. Finally, after hearing from the Canadian inventor of LOL, laughing out loud, here's part of a story from New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik about the time his son introduced him to instant messaging and its acronyms. I'm Nil Koksal. Thanks so much for listening to The Current.

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ADAM GOPNIK: And then there was one that he didn't even have to teach me because it was so self-evident. And that was "lol" and I knew right away that it meant lots of love because he put it at the end of every message that he sent me. And even when I sent him a really sententious message, you know, one of those things just do the things you've got to do and then you'll be able to do the things you want to do. he would always write back, okay dad, lol Luke. And I was really moved by this because even when I was lecturing him, he was able to absorb it in a mature way and send lots of love back to me as he thought about it. And I thought, this is such a beautiful telegraphic abbreviation for the 21st century. You guys, it's like a little arrow of love you can send out to anybody, you know and for the next six months, I was infatuated with instant messaging and its power of emotional transmission. And I sent lol out to everybody I knew. My sister was getting divorced out in California and I wrote to her. We're all behind you and beside you, lol, your brother. Everybody I knew, everyone I knew at work, at home, everyone, I sent them lol and I was an instant messaging demon.

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Dec. 23, 2019 episode transcript

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