The Mailbag Episode

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In the late 2000s, Carissa Langlow heard about this word that some people despised.

I had never thought about it before, but as soon as somebody told me that they hated the word, I was like, yeah, me too.

It's

pretty disgusting.

The word in question?

Moist.

Moist came into English usage in the 14th century.

And over the next 700 or so years, it seems to have been just another word.

Like how moisture and moisturizer are just words.

By the end of the 20th century, something odd had started to happen.

The one word that really surprised me, I guess because it hadn't showed up that much earlier, was at the top of the heap on the uglies, and that was the word moist.

That's Mississippi State University professor Robert Wolverton on NPR in 2001.

For years, he'd been asking students what words they thought were the most beautiful and most ugly in the English language.

Moist hasn't looked back since.

What's wrong with her?

She hates that word.

What word?

Moist?

Seriously, stop.

It showed up as a punchline on the TV show How I Met Your Mother and also in Dead Like Me and The Onion.

Linguists started to ponder it in blog posts.

The Facebook group, I hate the word moist, attracted thousands of members.

By the early 2010s, New Yorker readers had selected it as the word to be removed from the English language.

Dane Cook had done a stand-up set about it, and People magazine even got some of the sexiest men alive, including Christian Slater and Tyson Beckford, to say it.

Moist.

Moist.

Moist.

Moist.

Sick.

Carissa hadn't liked the word moist either, but as she watched the moist aversion grow, it struck her as strange.

I feel like you would have to have been told at some point that somebody else hated that word for you to even think of that as your least favorite word.

And so she took this strange subject she'd been thinking about for a while and emailed someone about it.

You emailed us a question.

What was your question?

Why does everybody hate this one word?

You need to solve this mystery for me.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

We're really lucky to get a lot of emails from you, our listeners, suggesting topics for the show.

We love getting these emails, and so in this episode, we're taking on five of them.

We're gonna look not just at the word moist, but at kids' menus and succulents and why we have red and blue states, and even why the chicken crossed the road.

It's an eclectic bunch of subjects with fun and surprising answers that all come thanks to you.

So, today, on Decodering, let's jump into our mailbag.

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Hey, I'm Candace Lem and I'm Kate Lindsay.

And we're the hosts of ICYMI, Slate's podcast about internet culture.

On a recent episode, we had to talk about a certain somebody's tweets, and that somebody happens to be my governor, Gavin Newsome.

If you haven't seen them recently, they've kind of gone, let's say, off the rails.

There was some Fox News host you just called a ding-dong.

And as Slate's Luke Winky tells us, this isn't the first time the California governor tried to capitalize on the country's mood of the moment.

I'm in a group chat with some men from California.

Okay.

A male journalist who used to cover California politics that I just like, can you give me a rundown of all the Gavin Newsome stuff?

And like one of the first three things he said was like our typical performative male.

So does that mean his shift to Trumpian tweets is actually working?

Find out by listening to the whole episode on ICYMI and be sure to follow ICYMI now wherever you get your podcasts.

We're going to start by picking up where we left off with the word moist.

It turns out our listener Carissa, is not the only person who's been curious about it.

My name is Paul Thibodeau, and I'm an associate professor of psychology at Oberlin College.

About 10 years ago, Paul, who is always on the lookout for topics that can get his students excited about research methodology, raised the subject of moist in his classroom.

A lot of students just expressed complete disgust at the word moist, and I thought that was interesting.

And we decided to try to design a study that would tease out why some people hate the word.

Paul went on to run that study.

It found that 20%

of people really dislike the word, which is a lot of people.

And then he tested three hypotheses about why.

The first was that moist aversion had something to do with how the word sounds.

People who really don't like the word moist, they'll often point to the sound of the word and say,

it's the sound that I don't like.

So they had participants rate a number of different words.

Our prediction was that if it's the sound of the word driving this aversion, then people who hate moist should also hate, you know, rejoiced and voiced.

That's not what we found.

So nobody really disliked those words.

The second theory was that people didn't like the word because of its connotations, be they sexual, think moist panties, or just a connection to bodily secretions.

And so they also asked participants to rate words about sex and bodies.

So like puke and and phlegm and vomit and stuff like that.

And it really was those, the disgusting bodily functions, not the sexual connotation words, but it really seemed like the aversion was driven by the semantics of human bodies.

So, it was almost like it was moist, it was more like related to sweat than to like

panties in your like findings, basically.

Yep.

Yep.

The third thing they wanted to look at was how much the whole thing was just a fad, a meme, a dislike people were passing around, which is also, it turns out, the hardest thing to test for.

It's hard to interpret, but we do think there's some fad component to it.

There seems to be a very strong cohort effect.

We surveyed like over 2,000 people, and the people who were most likely to find moist aversive were sort of young people in the kind of 20 to 30 age bracket.

At the time, it was young women who tended to be a little bit more sensitive to disgust on average.

The point here is that lots of people have random word aversions and affinities and always have, as captured in this famous Monty Python sketch.

Newspaper, litter bin, dreadful, tinny sort of word.

Tin, tin, tin.

Oh, yeah, don't say tin to Rebecca.

You know how it upsets, son.

But these preferences tend to be singular.

Carissa, who emailed us this topic, really likes the words carbuncle and avuncular, for example.

But that kind of singular reaction is not what you see in Paul's study.

Instead, there's a group reaction, suggesting that something collective and cultural is going on.

And that understanding of what's going on with moist seems to be the one that's had legs.

It's not a dry cake, is it?

No, it's not dry.

So it must be wet.

But you wouldn't say that!

Would you even say you've got a wet cake?

Um, any other word?

That's a TikTok where one guy is desperately trying to get another to say the word moist.

It's in the same spirit as a recent viral tweet by the user Vinnie Thomas that reads, I will never forget when all of you pretended to hate the word moist.

You ruined that word's entire career.

And for what?

But when I asked Paul if he thought our aversion to moist was fading, he wasn't so sure.

I don't know.

I thought it would, but I'm still seeing a lot of negativity around the word moist.

I think it would be worth collecting some new data on it.

Yeah, we're all doing this.

Are we still doing it?

If Paul does that follow-up study, we'll let you know how it goes.

Our second question comes from a listener in New Jersey.

Hi, my name is Minna, and I'm 11 years old.

I never really paid attention to kids' menus.

They're just a second second option if I didn't want anything on the main menu.

But when I was given a kids' menu at a restaurant in Iceland, it got me thinking.

When did kids' menus become a thing?

That's my question.

Thank you.

Be forewarned.

I'm not sure I can explain why there are children's menus in Iceland.

But Andrew Haley, a historian at the University of Southern Mississippi, can explain how we got them in America.

And prior to the 1920s, we didn't really have them at all.

Most restaurants took a really dim view of children.

Upscale hotels, when they were forced to accommodate children, often set aside segregated spaces, segregated times for children to dine.

Generally, independent restaurants just discouraged children.

But that changed, and it changed in the 1920s, and it changed fairly rapidly.

This was because of prohibition, the constitutional amendment that went into effect in 1920 banning the sale of alcohol.

When we talk about prohibition, we usually talk about the rule breakers, the restaurants, the cabarets, the speakeasies that defied the law and served alcohol.

But restaurateurs, for the most part, didn't break the law.

So what happened is tons of bars closed and lots of restaurants stopped serving alcohol.

So they'd lost a revenue stream.

And they also had all this new competition because a lot of the bars that closed reopened as restaurants.

In fact, the number of restaurants in the country tripled in the 1920s, and all of them were looking for new customers.

And there was a whole half the population they'd been ignoring.

Restaurants in the 19th century had been very suspicious of women diners, but in the 1920s and the early 1920s, restaurants really make a push to get these women to start dining out on their own, dining out during the daytime when they're shopping downtown.

The problem is many of these women have children with with them and the restaurants are not accommodating the children.

And so they start to.

In 1928, for example, Marshall Fields, the Chicago department store, introduced a children's menu.

And that's a huge deal.

Within a year, they see the number of children diners increase by 5% during weekdays and 20% during the weekends.

That's over a thousand children showing up on the weekend to dine at this restaurant.

The Marshall Fields children's menu had pictures of mother goose and other fairy tales drawn on it, and kids could pick their food out of a glass case.

But what they were picking was not exactly what you would find on a kid's menu today.

So there's a chicken croquette that's shaped like a chicken.

And really weirdly, there is a

sweetbread croquette shaped like an eye.

Don't quite know what the appeal of that was, but there you go.

And what Marshall Field is able to say to parents is, look, we are so good at feeding children.

The foods that your children won't eat at home, they will eat when they come to our restaurant.

What?

Are they like feeding them broccoli?

Like, what is it?

Yes, they're feeding them broccoli.

And boiled meats and lots and lots of vegetable platters.

The appeal is that the food will be viewed as healthy by parents.

And it worked.

Kids' menus spread very quickly, and the broccoli quotient started to come down pretty fast too.

First during the Great Depression, when parents were more concerned that their kids were eating at all than worrying about whether or not it was healthy.

And then further still after World War II.

There's a lot of writing about this time about how children are actually help play a role in the consumer choices that parents make.

And so if you want to get parents to go out and dine out, right, to not stay home with the TV dinners, you actually have to incentivize it for the children themselves.

And so in the post-war era, what you get is you get restaurants that not only start producing food for children, but produce incentives for children.

And so you have restaurants that will give a child a balloon if they come in, or cardboard toys, or, you know, the Howard Johnson placemats with the games on them.

This is when you start to see the food that we now expect on children's menus, grilled cheese and chicken fingers and hot dogs and hamburgers.

The last two being kids' food staples that you never, ever would have seen on a menu, even just a few decades earlier.

Hamburgers in the 1920s were this kind of highly suspect food.

It was ground meat.

Anything could be in ground meat.

And before the regulation of the meat industry, anything often was.

But suddenly, in the post-World War II era, we're finding these two foods that at one point in time we wouldn't, you know, adults wouldn't eat.

They're now feeding to their children because children are dictating their diets.

And these ideas about what children want to eat when they have a choice, whether they're true or not, are still guiding kids' menus in America and also apparently Iceland to this day.

Our next topic comes from the listener, Jacqueline Swope, in Washington State.

About 10 years ago, a friend of mine sent me a photo of a planter that she was working on in her backyard.

It was a wagon wheel, and in the spaces between the spokes, she was putting all of these little succulent plants.

I think she might have been the first person I know to get on the now

everywhere trend of having succulents.

Because in the next 10 years, those little tiny plants have basically taken over the world.

I mean, they are everywhere, and not just the plants themselves showing up in the backgrounds of photos and in the covers of magazines, but also you can get representations of them in art on t-shirts and fabric and coffee mugs.

So I'm hoping, Decoder Ring, that you guys can decode this one for me.

How did succulents get so popular?

I've wondered about this question too.

I had succulents at my wedding and I may have had an iPhone case with some cacti on it for a time.

But I've been hesitant to do a whole episode about it because I felt like someone someone had already covered it.

My name is Alyssa Bereznak, and I'm a senior staff writer at The Ringer.

Alyssa wrote a piece back in 2018 called How Succulents Took Over the World.

What is a succulent?

Okay, so this is a question like much debated over the years among like total plant nerds and scientists.

But the characteristic thing about a succulent is that

they have evolved

survive harsh conditions.

They have waxy skin.

They do photosynthesis at night.

They're great at pulling water out of the air.

Lots of other stuff, too.

So they're just like little survivalists.

And also, they look cool.

From an aesthetic viewpoint, they all have very striking, clean lines.

Some are round, some are pointy.

Not only are they self-sufficient, but they take a mean photo.

Or at least we think that now.

For a long time, people were not of this opinion.

They vastly preferred flowering perennials, you know, roses and orchids and pretty colorful flowers.

The first Rose Gardeners Association in the United States was founded in, I think, 1892.

Whereas like there wasn't an organization like that for cacti and succulents until 1929.

And even the purpose of these organizations at that time was to get together and lament about like how no one appreciated these plants.

And in some cases, housing communities, like homeowners associations would ban them because they thought they were like an aesthetic disgrace.

But the succulents fortune started to turn in the 1990s.

As dot-com money flooded into California, tech companies commissioned new buildings and the architects didn't want the same old perennial landscaping.

They appreciated the succulents clean lines.

That was a big breakthrough moment for succulents.

And then like, you know, that that continued for a couple of years.

This is all happening over like decades but a drought hit california 2011 and people were looking for more water wise plants and that's what succulents are designed for like from nature by now like 2011 we're in the early ages of web 2.0

i cannot even begin to emphasize to everybody how much i love succulents they are the best ever period That's one of many videos you can find online full of love for and advice about succulents.

Millennials started scooping them up.

They're affordable, minimalist, ecologically undemanding, not played out plants that are hardy enough to ship in a box and that look good in a room and on Instagram.

Plus, they're, as mentioned before, survivors, which means they are very hard to kill, even if you're a negligent plant parent.

They're the plants that are most able to be the buddies of humans.

Like, they're just so resilient.

I mean, they have to have light.

Like, there are, you know, like big disclaimer, like, I've killed my fair share of succulents.

That was back when Alyssa first started getting into plants, though.

As I was becoming more of an adult and like sort of growing out of my 20s, I was like, now I'm serious about interior design.

And

I decided to try and add some like plant accents.

All of those plants are dead now.

Rest in peace starter plants.

But

as a result, I think I sort of realized that succulents were the way to go in many ways because they didn't require much effort from me and I was still getting my sea legs in the gardening world.

Plenty of other millennials were having a similar experience.

Of course, millennials documented their plant purchases because they document everything and that created influencers.

Succulent influencers include Instagram accounts and hip plant stores that seek out really cool looking specimens.

They include people who do crafts and displays with succulents glue gunned into artful arrangements.

And they also include a plant explorer and breeder who introduces wild new patented varietals, which slowly make their way across the internet and into people's homes.

Between 2012 and 2017, cactus and succulent sales jumped something like 64%.

And then the largest breeder and grower of succulents in the world, it's a company called Altman Plants in California.

And they started supplying for like Walmart and Home Depot and Lowe's.

And they also started like developing

their own plants, like breeding them and patenting them so that they would be more social media friendly.

And as succulents were spreading, as Jacqueline mentioned in her question, so was their likeness.

Simple, cute drawings of an aloe or a sedum or a cactus can now be found on greeting cards, cardigans, and knickknacks of all kinds.

The equivalent I think of is like the Portlandia skit of like put a bird on it, like put a cactus on it.

I mentioned that I have not been immune to this particular trend, and I have a hunch about its appeal.

Succulents are not pretty flowers, they are not dainty, they can be pointy and prickly.

They're a little weird.

Their charms are not obvious.

You have to do a little work to like them, and that makes them seem sophisticated, offbeat, not for everyone.

Until, of course, it turns turns out they are

because everybody likes to feel a little offbeat sometimes.

In the piece, you talk, so which wasn't you talked to someone who said it's a trend, it's gonna, it's gonna crest at some point.

And I'm curious, do you think it's cresting or crested?

I think, in terms of like what you're talking about, the like cutesy cacti on phone cases and stuff, I think that's on its way out.

Like, I think that these plants will be a huge fixture of every sort of like houseplant craze, no matter what.

Maybe this is just me as a fan of succulents and cacti speaking, but I like, I just don't think that that part is going to go away.

Because, like, if you've ever tried to take care of a fern, like, yes, a fern is beautiful, but a fern is like

ready to die the second you pot it.

Like, there are opportunities to move into different vibes within the giant genus of like what are succulents.

We'll take on a couple more questions after the break.

Hey, it's Mary Harris, host of Slate's daily news podcast, What Next?

This week, we're following the real-time collapse of public health in the U.S.

under Donald Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services.

One of RFK Jr.'s long-standing targets has been vaccines.

A porva Mandavili at the New York Times Times says he's trying to make it difficult for big pharma to make them available at all.

Vaccines are not a moneymaker, and the only reason companies have stayed in the business is because of these protections, because of the guaranteed demand.

If those things go away, they have zero incentive to stay and continue to make vaccines.

Check out What Next, wherever you listen.

Imagine you could actually change fundamental fundamental law in this country.

What would you want?

Hey there, I'm Dahlia Lithwick, Coast of Amicus, Slate's podcast about the Supreme Court and the law.

And you just heard from writer and historian Jill Lepore, our expert guest, on a recent episode of Amicus.

Jill provided the vital and timely reminder of the power and promise of constitutional amendment as laid out in her new book, We the People.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the Trump regime's lawlessness and horrified by the Supreme Court's complicity, have a listen to our episode, How to Fix Our Broken Constitution.

I think it will give you some much-needed hope and reminders.

The power to

amend the Constitution comes from the people to Congress and then back to the people.

We're back with new episodes every Saturday.

That's Amicus.

We'll see you there.

Let's dive back in with our next question.

My name is Josh Einson, and I live in Los Angeles, California.

During the last election cycle, I got into a conversation with my best friend, who is younger than me, about red versus blue states.

He was asking if Democrats had always been blue and Republicans had always been red, and I was stumped.

I feel like when I was younger, the colors weren't necessarily tied to the parties when the maps were being put up on election nights, but am I imagining that?

When did red states and blue states become a thing?

And now I'm going to get out of my closet because it's hot and sweaty in here.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's a pretty recent phenomenon, actually.

Katie Uwe is an historian.

It's very pervasive, very universally recognizable in the United States, but is of somewhat recent vintage.

And it's pretty tied up with the history of television.

Prior to television, citizens got their news via radio or newspaper, which weren't in color.

And neither was early TV.

And that big map, the black portions of it, indicate where the Democrats are in the lead.

And those with the stripes, where the Republicans are leading so far.

But TV colorization happened over the course of the 1960s.

So that was part of the impetus to have color-coded maps and to also have big striking visuals.

It was mainly just you needed contrasting colors.

It needed to be very clear who won which thing.

The polls have closed or just about to close now in about 16 states around the country.

So let's look at our map first.

1976 was the first time there were illuminated

color-driven maps used across all three networks.

But the anchors didn't address the map directly that much.

And when they did, red and blue were randomly assigned.

Now if we can take a look at our map and let me point out to you its more salient features and colors.

The blue lights, of course, indicate that we have called a Republican winner.

The red lights indicate we have called a Democratic winner.

Up to this point, there had been an association between Democrats and red and Republicans and blue going back to the colors of the Confederate and Union armies.

But it wasn't that strong of an association.

And in the coming years, the networks started to do their own thing.

The

attribution of blue to Democrats and red to Republicans happens in a sort of piecemeal way over the 80s and 90s.

By 1992, CVS, ABC, and CNN had blue for the Democrats, and NBC was still doing blue for the Republicans.

By 1996, it was everybody was doing blue for the Democrats.

So 1996 is the first election where all the major broadcasts are doing it the same way.

This consistency allowed viewers, armed with remote controls, to switch between channels without getting confused.

Good evening.

Welcome back, I hope, to our political coverage of election 96.

Welcome if you're joining us for the first time.

If you take a look at the map of the country up there, you can see at least in color terms what it looks like up until now.

It is now.

But still, in 1996, though the maps were physically central to the election night newsrooms, they weren't that central to the coverage.

But that was not the case in the next election.

There we have the electoral map.

The red is for Governor Bush.

The blue are the states that Vice President Al Gore has won.

There are three states that are still too close to calls.

Everybody was looking at the electoral map and for a really long time.

Like the election wasn't actually called until December 12th.

So if you think about weeks and weeks of wall-to-wall news coverage and newspaper coverage, and everybody was trying to understand what had happened in Florida.

And so the using of the term like red and blue states conversationally or interpretively really dates from the 2000 election.

By 2004, just four years later, red states had become so closely associated with Republicans and blue states so closely associated with Democrats and both so closely associated with a set of ideas and values that a rising political star could refer to them in a speech at the Democratic National Convention.

The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states.

We are one people, all of us defending the United States of America.

It was a relatively new way of describing our political allegiances, but it already felt entrenched.

And now, almost 20 years later, it feels even more so.

On to our last question.

Hi, my name is Mariana and I'm a dog groomer from Louisville, Kentucky.

I don't remember the first time I heard the How Does the Chicken Cross the Road joke.

The other day, I was thinking about it and it just like struck me that it's so strange.

Every person I've ever met knows this joke.

And yet I don't think I know anyone who's ever laughed at it or thought it was funny.

My question is, is: why

is how did the chicken cross the road such an iconic joke?

It's weird, it's confusing.

I feel like I don't understand it.

I feel like most people who tell the joke don't understand what it means.

Why is this our go-to iconic joke?

To take this one on, I had a chat with Ian Brody, a professor of folklore at Cape Breton University, who's helped out with previous episodes.

We jumped right in.

In a structure, it's a riddle,

the standard question and answering, where you anticipate some kind of, not necessarily profound, but at least clever answer, some kind of wordplay, something is happening.

And there isn't.

So all of a sudden, it's making fun of riddles itself by having the most boring podunk answer.

Well, why else would a chicken cross the road?

It could only be to get to the other side.

I hate to use words like meta-jokes, but it's a meta-joke.

It's interesting, though, right?

Like, to start kids on a meta-joke.

It's like the thing jokes do is not what you expect, but they don't expect anything about jokes yet.

Exactly.

Trust me.

In years from now, when you understand meta-readings and irony, you'll really enjoy this.

I mean, why do you think that it is the joke we teach kids first?

Like, is there a reason?

I mean, it might just be one of those things like, when you introduce jokes, you just go to that one just cuz.

And there is a certain aspect of just cuz-ness that is sort of endemic in all of these questions about folklore and where these things come from.

Despite the fact that the joke

doesn't necessarily surprise us anymore, it still might kind of delight us.

It might delight us in its lameness.

It might delight us in the fact that we are introducing someone to part of our canon.

You know, in order to be a functioning human being in North America, you need to know this joke.

It's kind of like a standard bit of our

lore.

What is the origin of this joke?

I know that origins and things like this are.

Origins are almost impossible to figure out because this is probably something that existed in some form of oral circulation well before it ever got put into print.

One of the earliest print references Ian found was in an 1860s Australian newspaper, which suggested to him it had been going around the English-speaking world for quite some time.

Soon thereafter, you're already getting the twist on that old joke, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba.

You know this already, so I can build something else on it.

It's a standard reference, and I think it's been a standard reference for the better part of 150 years.

Now, with some regularity, it goes viral on Twitter.

because someone's like, wait, is it about death?

Yeah, where the other side has some kind of deep meaning to it.

Yeah, but then you're like, they're crossing the road to get hit by a car.

Yeah, it's crossing over.

And

all of a sudden it's this liminal state.

There is this

strange process that I think we all go through where, especially when we have something as dumb as that joke, where we just overlay it with profundity that probably wasn't there.

When you ask that question, why is this the first joke that we tell?

It's like, well, now instead of being, it's a dumb joke that you have to know, it's like, oh, there's a deep, dark meaning to it.

And again, you won't understand it until you're in your mid-20s or you're facing the grim specter of death.

But trust me, you're going to want to come back to this joke.

The thing I like about it is like Artist's incredible ability to like.

paper and accrue meaning onto anything.

Yeah, it's fan fiction, basically.

And, you know, so that my head canon is that it has to do with spiritualism.

Have you come across this thing where, you know, people are now saying, Today I learned that the pig that went to market wasn't there to go shopping, it was there to be sold.

Yeah, he's also, this also just also reminds me of like ring around the rosie, only because ring around the rosie does have this, like, it's about disease, right?

It's like, I mean, maybe they say, oh my dear, no, it doesn't, it doesn't.

It's so an explanation.

I'm popping in to say that what I was referring to is the idea that ring around the rosy, with its references to falling down and ashes and a rosy rash, has to do with the plague, the Black Death, and specifically the time it swept over England in the 1660s.

Is that not true about Ring Around the Rosie?

It is not true.

It has been disproven, but it was something that started to crop up.

I think it was only in like maybe the 1930s.

Philip Hiscock, who used to teach at Memorial University, basically did the work and it's like, yeah, no.

I mean, maybe late 19th century people started describing it, but again, it's an explanation

of meaning that's being superimposed upon it.

Because we're like, why are we saying ashes, ashes?

It's like it has to be.

Because sometimes we do and sometimes we don't.

Sometimes it's like, husha, husha, or russia, russia.

Or, you know, why do we all fall down?

It's like, well, it's because we're all dead of the plague.

No, it's because falling down is fun when kids do it because they're small and they're not hurting themselves.

We've been doing this forever is also just like imputing

more serious meanings to children's rhymes because we're like, it can't just be that simple.

It's difficult for us to imagine either nonsense or sort of joyous play in our artifacts.

It's like, oh, this must have stuck around because it's important somehow, even if the meaning is lost.

It's like, nah, it's just fun.

And I hope this was fun for you too.

I know that it was fun for us.

Thank you so much for all of your questions.

Thanks for thinking about the show.

And thank you for listening.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

Truly, we love getting these emails.

They are extremely helpful.

They are really fun to read.

Even if your suggestion did not show up in this episode, I promise that we read it and we loved it.

I'd like to thank Mark Lieberman and Susan Schulten.

I'd also like to give a shout out to a couple of listeners who have also suggested the topics we covered today.

Jessica Wagstrom also suggested Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road and Ash S.

mentioned succulents in an email a while back now.

This episode was written by me, Willa Paskin.

I produced a codering with Katie Shepard.

This episode was also produced by Sam Kim.

Derek John is Slate's executive producer of narrative podcasts and Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

If you're a fan of the show, I'd also love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

We're doing a Slate Plus episode that's like a behind the scenes on how we made this season.

It'll come out in a week or two.

And Slate Plus members get to listen to Decodering without any ads.

Their support is also crucial to our work.

So please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

That's it for us for this season.

We'll be back in the spring.

Until then, be well and thank you for listening.

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