Secret Languages We All Speak & Amazing Changes in Nature You Never Knew

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Speaker 2 Today on something you should know, the strange science of itching and scratching. Then the fascinating world of secret languages.

Speaker 2 Every family, every group, every industry has its own secret language.

Speaker 3 I mean the language of the stunt world. I mean you know you need to describe different types of camera movements.
You know we're going off sticks, means we're taking the camera off the tripod.

Speaker 3 The martini shot, the martini shot is the last shot of the day and people find it amusing and pleasing and it just enters the language.

Speaker 2 Also, what's the deal with bananas? Are they healthy or not? And some of the most fascinating clues in nature you may have never noticed.

Speaker 4 So a really nice simple one is if a cloud is taller than it is wide, it's a classic sign that the atmosphere is unstable.

Speaker 4 That makes rain showers more likely, particularly if you see them in the morning. It makes thunderstorms more likely.
It makes hail more likely.

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Speaker 2 Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today.

Speaker 2 Something you should know with Mike Carruthers.

Speaker 2 So when I tell you that we're going to start this episode by talking about itching, the fact that I just said that may have already caused you to start itching, which is part of what we're going to talk about.

Speaker 2 Hi and welcome. I'm Mike Carruthers and this is Something You Should Know.
So we all know there's nothing more satisfying than than scratching an itch.

Speaker 2 Yet what's interesting is researchers have uncovered what they call the itch-scratch cycle.

Speaker 2 It's a loop where scratching might feel good for a moment, but scratching actually makes the itch come back stronger. Here's how the loop works.

Speaker 2 When you feel an itch, you scratch it, and that scratching triggers mild pain signals, which momentarily distract you from the itch. But here's the catch.

Speaker 2 The pain signals from the scratching prompt your brain to release serotonin and other chemicals which don't just reduce the pain they amplify the itch in other words you scratch you get serotonin you feel itchier so you scratch more on top of that there's this phenomenon of contagious itch seeing hearing or even imagining someone scratching or being told about an itch can make you feel itchy so yes your mother was right don't scratch that itch itch.

Speaker 2 And one practical tip is that instead of scratching, try gentle rubbing or stroking around the itchy area.

Speaker 2 Some recent work suggests that soft gentle strokes can disrupt the itch signal without triggering the whole cycle again. And that is something you should know.

Speaker 2 When you were a kid, or maybe with your own kids, you probably had a secret language. A few strange words or phrases that only people in the family understood.

Speaker 2 Maybe it came from a mispronunciation or a family inside joke, or it's just a word that stuck. But secret languages don't just belong to kids.

Speaker 2 Every field, restaurants, retail, even podcasting, has its own private code. It's not exactly secret, but it's meaningless to anyone outside.

Speaker 2 So where do these special languages come from and why do we love creating them?

Speaker 2 My guest, Ben Schott, has been exploring that question and he is the author of a book called Schatz Significa, a miscellany of secret languages. Hey, Ben, welcome to something you should know.

Speaker 3 Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 So I'm obviously aware of secret languages and I've participated with others talking secret languages, but I never thought of it so much as something to study.

Speaker 2 And yet, they're everywhere.

Speaker 5 So we are surrounded by secret languages and we interact with them all the time without knowing them.

Speaker 5 So every time you go into a bar, the bartenders, the guys behind the bar will have their own language.

Speaker 5 Every time you go to a restaurant, the kitchen and the front of house will have their own language. Every time you interact with all sorts of groups,

Speaker 5 you are interacting with the language and you often don't see it or hear it because it's private.

Speaker 2 So when you look at all these secret languages and the worlds in which these secret languages are used,

Speaker 2 what do you get from it?

Speaker 5 The more I dived into any one of these worlds, the more I felt a tremendous empathy with the people involved.

Speaker 5 And it was a really interesting way because once you get into the language, you get into the mindset and to the perspective.

Speaker 5 So, for example, Starbucks, Starbucks baristas, I thought I was a perfectly polite Starbucks customer, coffee shop customer.

Speaker 5 I am so much more respectful and polite now, knowing what they have to deal with with, you know, the Gertrudes and the Krusties and the Touchers and the Hecklers and the TikTok guys who come in and they just shove the TikTok video and go make me the secret menu.

Speaker 5 There is no secret menu, but you know, TikTok creates these bizarre hack drinks. And so realizing like the language of Starbucks allowed me to really kind of, you know, get into the mindset.

Speaker 5 And when I go in, I'm a much better customer.

Speaker 2 So give me, because I know what you mean by bars and restaurants, but like, what are some of the words in pick a language and some of the words in that language that we we might be familiar with to give us a better flavor of this?

Speaker 3 So I'll give you an example of a word you won't be familiar with, which is the diamond district of New York. And it's a language that a lot of it is Yiddish.
There's some Hebrew,

Speaker 3 there's some Hindi, there's all sorts of different languages. And there's some English.
So for example, the word G, the G is the customer.

Speaker 3 And one of the diamond dealers I talked to talked about the G.

Speaker 5 And then another one said, oh, well, do you know about kitty with the G? So kitty with the G is something they'd say to one of their colleagues.

Speaker 5 They say, hey, kitty with the G, which means talk to the guy, don't let him leave the shop because I've got to go and check something in the back. So that's great.

Speaker 5 And armed with that, I go to another dealer who says, oh, well, if you know about kitty with the G, do you know about Sherry the G? And Sherry the G means get this guy out of here.

Speaker 5 It's like this guy's an idiot, Sherry the G, get him out of here.

Speaker 3 And that all came from this single term G that I then kind of zigzag from diamond dealer to diamond dealer, building up this composite.

Speaker 3 And you really get a sense of how they think about customers from the language they use.

Speaker 2 So why do you think we have these languages? Is it a bonding thing that the people in the group that use the language feel closer? Or is it an efficiency thing?

Speaker 2 It's easier to say these words that we all know what it means rather than explain it? Or why?

Speaker 5 Most of them, I think, are designed in order for people to sort of communicate quickly. So it's really about speed and efficiency and an esprit de corps.

Speaker 3 So for example, doctors and nurses. And some of that is just for speed.
Some of that is to

Speaker 3 communicate politely in front of a patient. So, you might say query mitotic lesion rather than saying query cancer, because cancer is a very scary word.

Speaker 3 And if you don't know what it is, you might use euphemism or a technical term that only other medics will know.

Speaker 3 And some of them are designed to sort of create an esprit de corps in a dark, difficult situation.

Speaker 3 So, sometimes it's about being in the weeds and overwhelmed, and like black humor and dark comic terms are a way to sort of bring people together.

Speaker 2 So different groups, different professions, different organizations have secret languages. I get that.
But they're secret to them. Only they know what they mean.

Speaker 2 And they're probably the only ones who really care about it. So why are we talking about it? Why is this significant?

Speaker 3 Well, there's this book that I saw as a schoolchild, and it was written in 1959. It's called The Law and Language of School Children.

Speaker 3 And I remember reading it because it was on my parents' bookshelves.

Speaker 3 And this husband and wife team in the late 1950s went from playground to playground across the United Kingdom and they interviewed children about their playground games.

Speaker 3 So skipping games, eeny, meeny, miney, moe, hopscotch, all of these things. Now you might say, well, who cares? This is literally childish.
I mean, like, why does this matter?

Speaker 3 And the reason why it matters and the reason why I coined this term significa is this is things that are normally overlooked. And actually, they tell us a tremendous amount about a time and a culture.

Speaker 3 These words will often just disappear and they will never be used again. And if you don't write them down, it's gone.
So there's a language of black cab drivers in London, the London cabby.

Speaker 3 And a lot of this language is fading away because what was a kind of white working class, small socioelect group of drivers, there's now huge diversity and Uber's taking over and this kind of thing.

Speaker 3 So the kind of the old cockney rhyming slang and some of the old terms are fading out. So if you don't write them down and collect them, it just disappears.

Speaker 3 And on the other side of the equation, I think if you really understand how people communicate, you also understand how they think.

Speaker 3 And I think there's a really interesting way of diving in, using language as the key to unlock thinking and experience and how professions operate.

Speaker 2 Good answer.

Speaker 2 And so, as you just said, you know, you watch children and they have their own language. And I would imagine every family with children has their own language.

Speaker 2 They have words for things that nobody else uses that maybe the child said trying to pronounce something as a young child and came up with another word. And

Speaker 2 they linger.

Speaker 2 I mean, we still use words just for fun. My son's 20 now, but we sometimes use the words that he created that's part of our family's secret language because we really like them.

Speaker 3 So, every family has a sort of ideolect or a socio-lect. I mean,

Speaker 3 one of the quick ways is ask different families what do they call the TV remote control?

Speaker 3 So, often there will be like a word that people use for the remote that is different from, you know, family to family and across the country.

Speaker 3 And in Britain, you know, whether you have tea or supper or dinner depends on your class and where you are in the geography and what time it is.

Speaker 3 So, there are all sorts of private words and terms that people use. So, Wittgenstein, because obviously he had to pop up, had this theory of the picture theory of language.

Speaker 3 So he's a philosopher who wrote about the theory of language. And he had this great quote and he said, the limits of my language are the limits of my world.

Speaker 3 And he was positing the idea that language sort of constricts and defines how we think and communicate.

Speaker 3 But the limits of my language mean the limits of my world actually is interesting because it also means that language defines our world.

Speaker 3 So how we communicate about our job really explains how we do our job.

Speaker 3 So for example, like understanding the language of, say, sommeliers or fox hunters, small groups of people across huge parts of society, it's a way of diving in. It's a shortcut to understanding.

Speaker 2 A lot of the languages, as I think about them, like the restaurant language and other things, you can sort of, even if you're not in their world, you can sometimes figure out what they're saying or what they mean by those words.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so it's secret and it is theirs, but it's not so secret.

Speaker 3 No, and I think if you worked in one of these places, pretty soon, you know, you would join the gang. So, you know, it's not necessarily to keep people out.

Speaker 3 I think it's a way of creating a kind of esprit de corps, creating a kind of in-group that we all do. And, you know, reality TV editors have their own terms because it's just easy.

Speaker 3 For example, they call it one of the terms they use is the chicken count.

Speaker 3 So the chicken count is you come back from um a commercial break and you have a quick chicken count so you say well ben is in the diary room and alan is in the snooker room and whatever and you count all the chickens so people who are viewing know where all the different characters are before you go into the next segment and that's just a really kind of quick easy way of understanding how they think about constructing each new sort of section after a break well i would i would use the word recap rather than chicken count.

Speaker 3 Well, they also use precap, recap, precap. I mean, they have dozens of them, but the chicken count is is by going sort of character to character.

Speaker 3 There's one of like 150 terms I have from reality TV editors, including my favorite, which is, of course, the wine slap.

Speaker 3 The wine slap is now the overused trope of people hurling glasses of Pinot Grigot into the faces of their fellow contestants.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that seems to happen a lot.

Speaker 3 Well, it's a very easy way to basically be aggressive without really sort of having to call the police.

Speaker 2 We're talking about the secret languages people speak. And my guest is Ben Schott.
He's author of the book, Schott's Significa, a miscellany of secret languages.

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Speaker 2 So, Ben, how do these words in these secret languages,

Speaker 2 where do they, how do they start? Like, where do they come from? Do they just show up or

Speaker 2 how?

Speaker 3 I think they show up. I think probably, you know, sometimes they get borrowed from other groups.

Speaker 3 I mean, the language of the stunt world, I mean, you know, you need to describe different types of falls. You need to describe different types of

Speaker 3 fights. You need to describe, you know, different types of camera movements.

Speaker 3 And sometimes it's just like pleasing slang. And sometimes it's just, it's a way of like, you know, going, we're going off sticks, means we're taking the camera off the tripod.

Speaker 3 And it's like, well, off sticks, you know, someone says it once and people just go, oh, that's cool. And it just gets used and used and used.

Speaker 3 The martini shot, the martini shot is the last shot of the day because, you know, we'll have this and then we'll make this shot and then we'll have a martini and people find it amusing and pleasing and it just enters the language.

Speaker 3 So I think probably it's just like all slang. Something strange happens and people go, oh, that's useful and fun and it just clicks.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that seems right. That seems really right.
That That you hear something and it just, that's really cool. I know exactly what he means, even though he doesn't have to explain it.
Let's use that.

Speaker 3 Indeed. No, absolutely.
And the world is full of it and it evolves all the time. And so, you know, one of the joys is like keeping track and realizing that, you know, you nothing stands still.

Speaker 3 The language is constantly evolving. And the internet is the great evolution machine because there's constant slang, constant memes, constant new ideas.

Speaker 3 And just like, you know, it's like playing tennis against a hailstorm.

Speaker 2 I wonder, too, if there's ever a thing in an industry

Speaker 2 because the industry evolves and there's something that doesn't have a word. Like, and here's an example.
So in podcasting, which didn't exist, you know, much in 15 years ago,

Speaker 2 There's commercials before the show starts, in the middle of the show, and after the show is over. And there was no word for that.
So somebody came up with pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll.

Speaker 2 And that is the term. Those are the terms that we use in podcasting.
But there was no other term. It wasn't like there was a term and this became a cooler term.
There was no term.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and technology is the great driver of neologism. So technology means, you know, you constantly have to, you know, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Bluetooth.
I mean, you need words to describe new technologies.

Speaker 3 And that's kind of the joy. And what's fascinating is to see what sticks and what doesn't stick.

Speaker 2 And you wonder, like, who comes up with the ones that stick? And is it just chance?

Speaker 2 Or

Speaker 2 are they the ones who come up with lots of words because they're clever that way?

Speaker 3 I don't know. I mean, I'd like to be the guy who gets a dollar for every time someone on TV says, could we have the room? And everyone else leaves.
Whoever said that?

Speaker 3 That strikes me as being something entirely made up by script writers. Has anyone in real life ever said, could we have the room?

Speaker 2 Well, and I remember hearing too that the term that we use, just people use when they want to sit in the front seat next to the driver is, you know, I got shotgun. I got shotgun.

Speaker 2 And the theory is that it goes back to the old west. But it doesn't go back to the old west.
It goes back to movies of the old west where it was first used. It was never used in the old west.

Speaker 2 It was used in a like a John Wayne movie, and that's how it caught on.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. So one of my favorite terms in the book is from the language of bartenders.
And there's a thing called the boomerang. Now, the boomerang is a drink that one bartender will make.

Speaker 3 So, they'll make a drink and they will take the glass and they'll wrap it in saran wrap or they'll put a kind of rubber glove over it in order to kind of stop it from spilling.

Speaker 3 And they'll give it to a customer, a loyal customer, to take to the next bar they're going to. So, bartenders can have drinks with each other during work.

Speaker 3 So, the boomerang, I mean, it's completely legal because it's a whole licensing issue, but a bartender will create, you know, an old-fashioned or whatever, and he will send it via a customer to another bar.

Speaker 3 And the boomerang, it's one of those things that in the bar world, you know, amongst mixologists and bartenders, like everyone knows about it.

Speaker 3 But like people will go into a bar all of their lives and never know about the boomerang. And my job and my joy is trying to spot these things and saying, hang on, wait, what? You have this boomerang?

Speaker 3 I need to know about this.

Speaker 2 I've never heard of the boomerang until just now.

Speaker 3 Well, and there's also, I mean, there's all sorts of of phrases. So I quite like the bartender's handshake.
So there are certain drinks,

Speaker 3 you know, like Chartreuse, Fernet Branca,

Speaker 3 the Ferrari, which is half Fernande Branca, half campari, that, you know, if you order it, it's kind of code like, yeah, I'm in the business. Like, you know, I'm drinking Fernet Branca.

Speaker 3 And it's one of those like, you know, bartenders to bartenders. It's what the industry drinks rather than like, you know, other liquor that, you know, civilians like me drink.

Speaker 2 Well, the boomerang thing is a great example of, like, you you could explain it the way you explained it, but wouldn't it be great to just have a word like boomerang and everybody knows what you what you're talking about?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, everybody does in that world, but it's not for me. It's not for the customer.
It's for, you know, the people in the industry. Right, right.

Speaker 3 You know, 86 in the weeds.

Speaker 3 I mean, there are all sorts of, I mean, what's fascinating, so I don't know if you've seen the TV show, The Bear, about this restaurant, and they've introduced lots of restaurant slang that was kind of back of house and now people are much more aware of it.

Speaker 3 So every now and again, TV does kind of open the kimono, as they say in business, to a little world. And I think the bear gets it really right.

Speaker 2 And when these private words and pieces of language become mainstream,

Speaker 2 does that have an effect on it? Does the industry that has it then abandon it and come up with something else? Because now everybody knows.

Speaker 3 That's a good question. I don't think so.
I mean, the fact that everyone knows what 86 means in a restaurant doesn't mean they don't use it or in the weeds or, you know, dying in the past.

Speaker 3 Some of these terms, I think they still use them, but

Speaker 3 because they're incredibly useful and it's just part of the kind of the lingua franca of the industry. I think things like technology is the biggest driver.
So the language of crypto, for example,

Speaker 3 is driving new words. But the language of NFTs, do you remember NFTs? No one talks about NFTs anymore.

Speaker 3 There was a whole little world of non-fungible tokens that was was huge and sort of dominated the media for six months. And like tulip fever,

Speaker 3 it wilted and died.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 whatever happened to those.

Speaker 3 I don't know. I sincerely hope.
I mean, my entire pension's in NFTs. So, you know, you've got to hope that something's going to happen to them.
But no, no, exactly.

Speaker 3 And so there's a huge churn in technology. But things like kitchen slang, I mean, it's been around for decades.
So I think it's going nowhere.

Speaker 2 Well, it's probably going nowhere because it's essential. I mean, it's fun and interesting interesting to hear, but it also plays a real role.
It's efficient, it's shorthand.

Speaker 3 So when I was researching restaurant slang, so each, there's kind of a universal restaurant slang. So things like 86 or all day, whatever, that everyone uses.
And then lots of basically all

Speaker 3 restaurants have their own slang.

Speaker 3 So for example, there's a restaurant in Manhattan called the Little Owl, and they have a term, which is the two-hour wait face, which is when people come up with that reservation and they say, how long for the next table?

Speaker 3 And then they're told, a couple of hours. And the two hour wait face is the look of kind of stricken horror when they realize how long they have to wait for a table.

Speaker 3 So each little restaurant has its own little slang. And I was talking to one restaurant and the general manager goes, we don't really have any slang, really.
And I'm like, I bet you do.

Speaker 3 And he's like, no. And then over like a course of 15, 20 minutes talking to him, he gave me five really great terms that were specific to his restaurant.
But because people use it every day,

Speaker 3 they don't think of it as real or significant or it's just normal. I mean, mean, it's sort of, it's so instinctive to them.
They don't think as an outsider that it's special or interesting.

Speaker 3 And I'm here to tell them that it is and to try and extract it from them and to really kind of dive in. So they then think what they do every day is actually curious and strange and fun.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I can understand that because if it's the word you use all the time,

Speaker 2 It's not slang. It's the word you use all the time.
So

Speaker 2 there's no slang about it. There's no other word that they would think to use.
It would probably take a sentence or two when that one word will explain. Precisely.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 2 In all the research you did for this, is there any

Speaker 2 little word or thing that we haven't talked about that just jumps out as like the coolest, most interesting thing that came up?

Speaker 5 One of the things we haven't talked about, which I really enjoyed, is there's a whole sort of number of sections on hand signals and gesticulations.

Speaker 5 Because, so, for example, there's the hand signals of open outcry oil traders.

Speaker 5 Now, you may not know what that means, but when you see on TV the guys in the pit and they're shouting and they've got their hands and they're making all these wild, odd gesticulations, that's called open outcry trading.

Speaker 5 And it's essentially disappeared. So, I photographed an open outcry, an oil trader explaining how all the hand signals work.

Speaker 5 So, for example, for heating oil, you draw your hand across your forehead because it's, you know, it's hot in here. For gasoline, you pinch your nose because of the bad smell of gasoline.

Speaker 5 And that's one of two of like a hundred different sort of hand signals they use.

Speaker 5 So there's the hand signals of African-American church ushers who have the whole system of hand signals so they can deal with large congregations seamlessly and silently because hand signals are a way of communicating during a service.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, I've never thought about this, but it is so strange to think how many secret languages there must be. And although they're secret, they're not really secret.

Speaker 2 It's just they don't matter to anybody except the people who use them and we've all used some of them i've been speaking with ben schatt and he is author of the book shots significa a miscellany of secret languages and there's a link to his book at amazon in the show notes ben thank you for being here not at all it was an absolute pleasure

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Speaker 2 Did you know, for example, that sunsets change color and timing with the seasons? or that water becomes murkier at certain times of the year?

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Speaker 2 He's the author of several books about nature and navigation, including his latest, The Hidden Seasons, a calendar of nature's clues.

Speaker 2 Hi, Tristan. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 4 Hi, Mike. Great to be here.

Speaker 2 So I want to start with you explaining what we're talking about.

Speaker 2 You have a great line in the beginning of your book that some some of the most rewarding observations are seasonal, which I've never thought about that,

Speaker 2 but when you think about it, when you think about the autumn leaves or the snowfall, a beautiful snowfall, it's all very seasonal. These things kind of come and go.
They're not constant.

Speaker 2 And I've never thought about any of this this way. So explain what this is and why it's important.

Speaker 6 Yeah, all of my work is based around the idea that everything outdoors is a clue. It's a sign.
It can reveal something else. Once we pause and just question something and say, what does it mean?

Speaker 6 You mentioned leaves turning, that's a good example. Fallen leaves, before the leaves have fallen, they start turning.

Speaker 6 You know, people start saying, oh, the leaves have turned, but actually, they would have been turning for a month before somebody starts saying that in conversation. If we know where to look.

Speaker 6 So if you look at the highest southern part of tall trees, you'll see the leaves change colour weeks before the low northern parts. That's because autumn accelerates with thirst.
So in fall,

Speaker 6 we see the season start high on the warmest part, which is the southern part of the tree, and then work its way down.

Speaker 2 And certainly one of the most beautiful seasonal changes that people notice and enjoy is springtime when flowers come up.

Speaker 2 And what are some of the things, the details of that, that I would find interesting?

Speaker 4 Yeah, sure. So if we start with, as winter's, you know, losing its grip, we start to see some of the very early wildflowers popping up.

Speaker 4 And it's sort of obvious that the certain flowers appear at certain times of the year.

Speaker 6 So in the case of very early flowers, we can say they are prudent savers. They have saved energy from the previous season.
Now that's a clue. It's telling us it's a perennial plant.

Speaker 6 So the earliest flowers have typically got bulbs underground or something like that, which allows them to go early. So it's a very simple clue in that sense.

Speaker 6 The first flowers you see each year, you will see in the same place the following year. They are perennial plants.
It just doesn't work.

Speaker 6 If you're going very early, you have to have something in the battery from the year before. Annual plants have to wait until the sun is higher in the sky.
The way I put it is punctual means perennial.

Speaker 6 If something's very early, you'll see it in exactly the same place the following year.

Speaker 2 Are there other examples of that besides flowers?

Speaker 6 Yeah, so stinging nettles,

Speaker 6 there's a good general rule in nature that however distant somebody feels from nature, if a plant causes pain, we tend to know its name.

Speaker 6 So stinging nettles, most of us kind of, you know, still have some relationship with. Now, for decades, I've had a fun relationship with stinging nettles because they form a good compass.

Speaker 6 They'll lean towards the light. So we find them sort of leaning towards the south where most of the light comes from.

Speaker 6 But they're also making a map because stinging nettles will only grow in places where there's

Speaker 6 a nutrient spike in the soil. and human beings change the soil.

Speaker 6 The way we live, the way we work, the way we farm, the way we die changes the soil, makes it richer in nutrients like nitrates and phosphates.

Speaker 6 And so stinging nettles are a sign, they're making a map that we're near human beings. We're near either a farm, a town or a city or something like that.

Speaker 6 So we've got a compass and a map from the plant already.

Speaker 4 And the seasonal thing with stinging nettles is they are perennial. So they can go quite early because they've been saving from the year before.

Speaker 4 So they're telling us something about direction, they're making a map and they're telling us something about time. They're letting us know we're in the early part of the growth year.

Speaker 4 They're a kind of a warning that a lot of other stuff is about to get going.

Speaker 2 Great. So what's another example of one of these nature signs that we probably completely miss?

Speaker 4 One of the most powerful things to tune into for all of us is the really rapid change in late March.

Speaker 4 So in late March we have the equinox, which is a word everybody's familiar with, but its true meaning I think has been lost.

Speaker 4 And what's happening in terms of the signs out there is the the length of day changes more in one week in late March than it does in the whole of the months of June or December so it it's really it's a truly dramatic change in the relationship between length of day and night and all the plants and animals tune into that so that's why we get that really I mean we all feel it and we've all had that sort of experience where you go felt like winter two weeks ago it's feeling much more like spring now and that's part of that, because we are, of course, animals.

Speaker 4 And so we're tuned into that.

Speaker 2 So I've always thought,

Speaker 2 because I've had that experience where I thought, well,

Speaker 2 how come it's getting dark so early? Or how come it's

Speaker 2 staying light so late?

Speaker 2 But I've always thought it was a gradual every day gets a little bit longer or every day gets a little bit shorter. I didn't know there were jumps in it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and that's part of what my work is all about, is taking these things that our ancestors were really tuned into because they had a much rawr experience.

Speaker 4 You know, winter, even 2,000 years ago, was not an easy time.

Speaker 4 And so they were tuned into the patterns they could see in the sun because it gave them reassuring cues that things were following the cycle.

Speaker 4 So if we take the word solstice, it comes from the Latin words meaning sun standing still, and that's because if you look at the eastern or western horizon, as you get into mid-winter, the sun is rising further south and setting further south every day but as we reach uh late december and the the solstice it appears that journey appears to stop uh and that for uh for the ancients our ancestors was a wonderful time because they're going wow wow if the sun just stops moving south at some point it'll start coming north again um but but for a for a couple of weeks in uh in late december it's very very hard to see any movement in the the direction of sunrise or sunset hence the word solstice but the opposite of that is the equinoxes late march late September,

Speaker 4 the direction the Sun is rising and setting is changing at its fastest possible rate. And that is just the other side of the coin that the day is getting longer or shorter

Speaker 4 at a rapid, dramatic rate.

Speaker 2 Do you think most people know that?

Speaker 4 I know they don't and I know that because I've been out speaking and I've given enough talks now where I can see the things where people's sort of eyes kind of, you know, they get wider.

Speaker 4 And that is one of them. And I think it makes sense to people, but I think it's one of the many things that we've lost.

Speaker 4 So, there are lots of things we can do in the modern lifestyle that our ancestors couldn't, but we have lost a few things along the way, and that's definitely one of them.

Speaker 2 So, something I've always wondered about is: as you notice the changes in the season, you notice there's a schedule, right? And it's a fairly predictable schedule.

Speaker 2 We know when the leaves are going to turn color and fall off the tree. We know when flowers will bloom in the spring.
And I've always always assumed, well, it's temperature, right? That

Speaker 2 the plants and probably some animals are responding to the change in temperature. But sometimes the temperature changes erratically.

Speaker 2 There'll be a heat wave when it should be cool, or there'll be a cold snap when it shouldn't be that cold. And what does that do to the schedule?

Speaker 4 We all kind of know if you have one really hot day, it doesn't suddenly change everything around you.

Speaker 6 Or if you have a cold snap, you're not expecting.

Speaker 6 Things don't change, you know, by the hour but what what the plants and animals are doing is counting something that's known as degree days so for every day the temperature is above a

Speaker 6 certain threshold uh that that counts so let's say it's it's five degrees above a line then you have three days of it five degrees above a line the plants and animals count that as 15 whereas if it was eight degrees for three days they count that as 24.

Speaker 6 so it's amazing they've got this kind of this hidden hidden kind of abacus where they're counting the the the the warmth over a period.

Speaker 6 And so all the things we think of as seasonal will be tied to both the length of the day and night and the cumulative change in temperature. And each species is different.
It has its own gauge.

Speaker 6 That's why

Speaker 6 some kind of like a small heat wave has a massive impact on small flying insects. That's why we suddenly get a cloud of flying insects in front of us.
But it won't change, for example,

Speaker 6 the number of horses in a field.

Speaker 6 Those animals are much more wedded to the length of day.

Speaker 2 So wait, why do we get a swarm of bugs when it heats up suddenly?

Speaker 4 It's a good question.

Speaker 6 And the way in, I think, is to think about reproduction strategies.

Speaker 6 So we can think of there being fast reproducers, and these tend to be very, very small insects who have short lifespans, high numbers of offspring, or the slow reproducers.

Speaker 6 So slow reproducers, a killer, whale, a horse, a human being. If you can count the number of offspring, it's a slow reproducer.
If you can't, it's a fast one.

Speaker 6 Now, what's that got to do with the seasons? Well, what we find is that the slow reproducers are tied to the length of day.

Speaker 6 So whatever the temperature is doing, it will only change things a very small amount. Whereas the fast reproducers are much, much more tuned into temperature.

Speaker 6 So if we have a little heat wave in spring or maybe a cold snap a little earlier than we're expecting it towards the end of the year, that will have a massive impact on those fast reproducers.

Speaker 6 Then all we have to do is notice that whenever we're in a landscape, there's going to be places where the fast reproducers are concentrated and a place where the slow ones are.

Speaker 6 So let me give you an example.

Speaker 6 If you're in a small woodland and you're in the heart of that woodland, you will be surrounded by slow reproducers, tall, mature trees, you know, maybe some larger mammals like a deer or something like that.

Speaker 6 Whatever the temperature does, whatever the weather does, those numbers are not going to change.

Speaker 6 If you walk to the edge of the woods, you're going from a slow reproducing to a fast reproducing area, you're suddenly seeing lots and lots of little wildflowers and a massive cloud of midges or other flying insects because the fast reproducers have picked up on the temperature change, responded to it.

Speaker 6 So every landscape is a mixture of that slow and fast.

Speaker 6 And once you kind of tune in and know to look for those, you can see why, you know, you might walk for 10 minutes and not notice a strange seasonal event, but then you move into a different area, a fast reproducing area, and you go, oh, wow, this feels like a different season.

Speaker 2 Is there a quick answer to this? Because I understand what you just said, and I have experienced that,

Speaker 2 but I don't understand why temperature change makes insects swarm. Like, why do they do that?

Speaker 4 So the smaller an organism is, plant or animal generally speaking, the more of an opportunist it is.

Speaker 4 So if there's a narrow window of like a week of mild weather in spring, smaller animals have evolved a kind of smash and grab strategy they're like let's go for it you know we can get through you know the whole reproductive sort of part in this small window so it makes sense for for small you know warm warm patches for small in small animals to go for it whereas the bigger ones it the whole cycle's too long so there's no bother trying to jump on a little temperature change Well, that's really interesting.

Speaker 2 I've never thought about that, but a short heat wave will increase the number of mosquitoes in the air, but it doesn't increase the number, as you say, of horses in the field.

Speaker 2 What's another example of some seasonal thing that I've probably missed?

Speaker 4 I talk about, you know, the clear phase in June, where

Speaker 6 if you've got a patch of fresh water you get to look at regularly, a pond or a lake or something like that, what you'll notice is at some times of the year, it looks quite murky and sometimes it looks transparent.

Speaker 6 And that's part of a seasonal rhythm that lots of people don't spot, but it's very easy to spot in June.

Speaker 6 What happens is in spring, as the temperatures as things warm the the algae start you know reproducing and we get a kind of murky appearance in fresh water.

Speaker 6 Then the the tiny animals they have their spike in June and they slightly overtake the algae and they gobble it all up basically and then the water just suddenly goes very clear in June.

Speaker 6 So it's it's ecologists you know know it as the the clear water phase in June. It's where just fresh water just suddenly goes very clear.
It only lasts a few weeks.

Speaker 6 Very easy to spot if you look for it but but hardly anybody knows to look for it.

Speaker 2 I would never look for it. I don't know.

Speaker 2 I would have never thought of that.

Speaker 2 But if you say it's true, it's true.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I would have never thought about how

Speaker 2 the northern part of a tree's leaves are different than the southern.

Speaker 2 I just would never think that.

Speaker 2 We started this conversation talking about autumn leaves.

Speaker 2 which are very apparent if you're in New England or wherever leaves change. But what else is going on in autumn? Because it seems like things are kind of shutting down for the winter.

Speaker 2 That's kind of the sense I get anyway from that this is the beginning of everything's closing up shop.

Speaker 6 One of the great joys of looking for clues and signs of nature is that we are not tied to living nature. So abiotic nature is just as fascinating.

Speaker 6 So once we get into autumn and winter, what we find is a whole series of maps made from things like dew on the ground frost and mists so if we just take mists as one example it's very easy to kind of look out at a landscape you you see some mist in one place and not in another and just go well that's just kind of random that's but nothing is random in nature so mist in the in in the autumn when we see mist in the morning that is a sign that's where the coldest air is cold air is denser than the mild air so it rolls downhill so the morning mist in autumn is making a map of the lowest parts of the landscape for you if you walk down into into a morning mist you can feel the temperature change do I remember correctly you were you write about twinkling stars that white stars twinkle at some times and not others and where they are in the sky and all that So what I encourage people to do is when you're first using twinkling stars to forecast weather is cheat.

Speaker 4 Cheat like crazy. Look at the forecast.
If you've got three or four clear nights forecast and then there's something worse coming in like a front, then

Speaker 4 watch the stars for three or four nights and try and pick the moment when you notice the amount of twinkling change that is one of nature's earliest warning signs of weather change again our ancestors would have been all over this because they didn't have the opportunity to cheat but what's happening is moisture in the upper atmosphere when that starts going up that's one of the earliest signs that that change is is on its way so as the as the starlight hits our atmosphere the more moisture the more twinkling so we just put those simple pieces to go together and we get more more twinkling in the stars.

Speaker 4 Ah, there could be some bad weather on the way.

Speaker 2 And that is what causes the twinkling is just moisture in the air between us and the star?

Speaker 4 Exactly. So in space, stars don't twinkle.
So you can look across a million, million miles of space and you won't see the stars twinkling.

Speaker 4 Not many of us will get that opportunity, but that's theoretically true.

Speaker 4 But from the surface of planet Earth, we're, of course, looking through our atmosphere. And

Speaker 4 even dry atmosphere, i.e. not much weather out there, there will be some twinkling because

Speaker 4 there's little particles that the light is bouncing off. But the second the moisture levels go up, it's like pimble for the light.

Speaker 4 And that's why the more moisture, the more kind of bounces that the light is taking, the more the star appears to twinkle or, as the scientists say, scintillate.

Speaker 2 Here's something you write about that I never knew. Maybe other people know this and I just haven't been paying attention.
But you say that sunsets,

Speaker 2 the kind of sunsets we have, change with the seasons.

Speaker 4 Yeah, we would, if we had no atmosphere, our nearest star, the sun, would appear as white light. So when we're seeing colors, it's a sign that our atmosphere is filtering out some of the other colors.

Speaker 4 And the reason why as the sun gets lower, we know those sunset colours, we start to see more yellows, oranges, and reds, is because the other colours aren't reaching us.

Speaker 4 And late in summer, as we reach the harvest season, what happens is we reach a time of year when we have the most particles in the atmosphere and they filter out most of the blue end of the spectrum.

Speaker 4 So we get much, much deeper reds. August is an absolute classic there.
And sometimes there'll be other things like there'll be fire events. So if there's something, you know,

Speaker 4 if there are forest fires or something like that, you'll see notably redder sunsets and sometimes sunrises.

Speaker 4 And if there's a lot, if there are a lot of particles in the air you'll see a tint in the moon as well.

Speaker 2 How about one more thing about fall, autumn? Because, well, it's one of my favorite times of year and it's also very dramatic change in many places where the leaves change and all that.

Speaker 2 So one more of those kind of things would be great.

Speaker 4 A really sort of seasonal moment for lots of people is seeing the leaves on the ground, brown leaves on the ground. And it's a good opportunity to appreciate that nothing is random in nature.

Speaker 4 So the second the leaves fall onto the ground they are shepherded by the wind.

Speaker 4 Now if you tune into where the wind's coming from in your part of the world you'll start to notice these rather beautiful simple patterns.

Speaker 6 Around the base of the tree, let's say your winds come from the west, you'll notice it's clean all around the western side of the tree trunk at the base there.

Speaker 6 But on the east side, there's a wind shadow where the wind can't get to, and that's where the leaves fall out.

Speaker 6 And it looks like somebody's got a broom and swept a pile of leaves onto the eastern side at the base there. It's weird.
It looks like somebody's tidying up.

Speaker 6 But actually, it's just a nice leaflet a compass.

Speaker 2 Well, and clouds tell us things, right?

Speaker 2 If you know what to look for in clouds, you can determine weather and whatnot.

Speaker 6 So a really nice simple one is if a cloud is taller than it is wide,

Speaker 6 it's a classic sign that the atmosphere is unstable. That makes rain showers more likely, particularly if you see them in the morning.
It makes thunderstorms more likely.

Speaker 4 It makes hail more likely. But as a general rule, you know, it's hard to go a whole week without there being a fantastic pattern to decipher in the sky.

Speaker 2 Well, I've said this before, but this is one of the great things about being able to do this show is I get to talk to people and learn things that like this.

Speaker 2 I would never seek this information out, but when I hear it from you, it's really interesting and it's stuff I'll remember.

Speaker 2 I've been speaking with Tristan Gooley, who has spent more than two decades studying nature and navigation, and he's the author author of several books, including his latest, The Hidden Seasons, a calendar of nature's clues.

Speaker 2 And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Tristan, I appreciate you coming on.
Thank you.

Speaker 4 Thanks so much, Mike. Thanks so much for having me on, and congrats on such a successful show.

Speaker 2 Have you heard that if you are watching your weight, you shouldn't eat bananas? After all, a banana has about 27 grams of carbohydrates and 14 grams of sugar, which is kind of a lot.

Speaker 2 So some people stay away worrying that it might trigger weight gain. Even a zoo in Britain once suspended bananas for its primates, citing their high calorie and sugar content.
But here's the thing.

Speaker 2 In a Time magazine interview, five leading nutrition experts, every one of them, said bananas are not just okay, they're great.

Speaker 2 Bananas are packed with potassium, about 12% of the recommended daily allowance in one banana.

Speaker 2 and most of us don't get enough potassium low potassium has been linked to elevated risk of stroke bananas also act like nature's own recovery drink a banana is full of nutrients and it's effective at refueling your body post workout if you're still tempted to skip the banana well then opt for half a banana but don't skip it entirely and that is something you should know supporting this podcast is easy just help us spread the word Tell people about it.

Speaker 2 Share it with people you know. Get them to listen.
You do that, and I ask you nothing else. I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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