Words of the Year

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Oh, it's me citing this, I'm sure.

I hope you enjoyed the fact when I put into the research document that one of my favourite things to read every year.

You know, it's really Christmas when you read the Pornhub Searches of the Year, which is always an incredible, horrifying insight into human nature.

I had no idea that data was available and accessible.

It's really quite something.

What's top?

Are you sure?

Oh, it's always

hentai MILF.

But there's been a big surge this year.

We won't put this in the show.

In Mormon threesomes.

Because the real housewives of Salt Lake City is big, massive, and people have gone, I really like that TV program.

I wonder if there are any Mormon threesoms on the internet.

Hello and welcome to Strong Message Here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Helen Lewis.

And it's also me, Armandianucci.

Festive, Helen Lewis, and festive, Armandi Inucci.

We're recording this in advance of Christmas, but have you got big...

Are you a big Christmaser or are you a low-key Christmaser?

Well, I'm kind of...

I'm rather taken by the royal family tradition, which of banning a member of a family from

being there for Christmas.

Introducing a welcome name was sort of a reality TV show.

It's a kind of good idea that might catch on.

You know, rather like in ancient Greece, they all used to vote on which person to be banished for 10 10 years.

And sometimes it wasn't someone who committed a crime.

Sometimes it was just someone who'd been terribly successful and everyone thought were just a bit up themselves.

So it would do them good to go away for.

You know, I'm not implying that any of this applies to Prince Andrew.

But you want to grab your family around, all get bits of pottery, and then write that name on that.

Maybe at the end of the meal, you know, like who's going to be banished from next year.

I think some people would...

actually quite enjoy being banished.

I've already done my Christmas tradition, which is that my husband and best friend come around every year and they together watch Love Actually and this year it had an extra frisson because of course that film was brutally criticised by Kemi Badenock who said the Prime Minister in it Hugh Grant is really very poor.

He really just says some very rude things to the American president that would be terrible for the special relationship.

Yeah, but it is a fiction.

She does know that.

It didn't actually happen.

It's not a documentary.

It's one of the most searing documentaries about life in Britain.

So I've done my I might I might sneak in a Muppet Christmas carol as well.

Yes, still voted by many Dickens fans as one of the most faithful adaptations of a Dickens novel on celluloid, in that it really does follow the story of a Christmas Carol really well.

For all you Dickens nerds, hello.

You've adapted Dickens.

How hard is it to adapt?

Well,

depends what you want to do.

But I always think of them as being quite not tabloid-y, because that sounds very bad, but he was a writer who had a lot of attention to the idea of the kind of cliffhanger and the need for a juicy piece.

But I found adapting something is less about the plot.

In many many ways, the plot of a Dickens novel is the least interesting bit.

And what's great is the language, the descriptions, the characters, the emotions, the psychology.

Now you've got me started.

Here we go.

And so it was about trying to get that across.

This was David Copperfield, which I adapted, Deb Patel playing David, and it was called The Personal History of David Copperfield.

And so it's about trying to convey the spirit in which it was written rather than a very literal, point-by-point reproduction of the story, I felt.

That's really interesting because I read this year Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, which transplants the same story to Appalachia and sets it at the background.

Instead of everybody taking laudanum and gin, they're all hooked on opioids.

Yeah.

And I thought that worked incredibly well.

And it's an, yeah, I think Dickens I always think of as a writer who really cared about mass appeal.

And maybe that's why they really lend themselves to multiple interpretations and adaptations.

Yes, and he was used to it.

If this is turning into a kind of Christmas with Dickens now.

Look, Love it, it's very cosy moments.

And Hanjari's now is Miriam Margulies, who's going to tell us her favourite Dickens.

No, Dickens at the time was fed up with, there was no copyright agreement, and so people put on plays of his novels as they were coming out.

So as he was doing Nicholas Nickleby, a theatre would put on, you know.

Nippopus Snippope, you know, we'd just not even bother to hide what it was ripping off.

Why didn't he do what I would have done in the circumstances, which is write things into my novels which were deliberately impossible to stage?

And if you're like, oh, on that point, you know, Miss Havisham was attacked by a dragon.

Like, try and put that one on, guys.

I mean, he does have someone in Bleak House does spontaneously combust.

It's a very neat way of getting rid of a character.

I haven't had Bleak House.

That's very funny.

Yes.

I mean, it's extraordinary.

And you sort of buy it?

Yeah.

Well, presumably when they staged that one, someone had to be put into a sort of fireproof suit and then

someone with a big candle came past.

I'm under, I'm derailing us.

Sorry.

I'm distracting us from our words of the year.

Right.

Okay.

Well, the official one from the Oxford English Dictionary is brain rot, which are two words, but you know, Oxford Dictionary has got sloppy.

What I liked about this one was the fact that it was actually originally coined apparently in 1854.

Oh, okay.

So Henry David Thoreau and his book Walden, which is all about him going and kind of trying to seek out a contemplative life, he said, while England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally.

And brain rot in its modern usage is really to describe how easily we're distracted, how going down the rabbit hole of looking at somebody on social media and finding we've spent 30 minutes, 40 minutes, 40 days looking at penguins falling over.

Yeah, but what I like about it being essentially a Victorian word is the fact that this is obviously a sensation that people have been having forever.

Forever, yes.

And you know, if you ever go back to the, I know you're a big fan of the 18th century, as am I, one of my favourite centuries, but you will find people in the kind of newspapers of the day complaining that every all these novels are terrible.

People are just sensationalists.

You don't, why aren't people reading Pliny anymore, like proper books?

Yeah, and it's going to eat up.

People are just not going to go to work because they're going to be, you know, devouring the latest troll-up.

Yeah.

Great phrase.

Yes, exactly.

So I totally agree with Brain Rotter's word of the earth.

The online writer Ed Zittron has another related phrase, which is he calls a lot of the internet the rot economy.

Okay.

Which is just this idea that

things are not really quite as good as they used to be, and products are getting worse.

So, one example would be: there's been a lot of controversy recently about Google search now gives you an AI preview.

Yeah, and notoriously, it said if you didn't want to use cheese and you were looking for a vegan alternative on pizza, you should use glue.

But that's the kind of thing, is that everyone's like, but Google, you had such a world-class product that you took 98% of the search engine market, and now you replaced it with a thing that tells me to have glue pizza.

Oh, yeah, well, that's falling for AI, isn't it?

The miracle.

I once attended a Google-sponsored weekend where, and I went there for research purposes, but I was asked to talk about, and everyone had to do like 20-minute talks.

They were a bit like TED talks, but Google.

And I was doing something about comedy and politics and so on.

But the other speakers there were tremendous, including the guy who runs Deep Mind for Google.

And Deep Mind, it doesn't sound sinister at all, really.

And he came on and he said, he had a slide presentation.

He said, what I want to do with Deep Mind is A, and along the screen, it went, solve the problem of artificial intelligence.

And then he went, and once we've done that, we're going to do B, solve everything else.

And there were lots of chuckles like you've just done there.

And he went, no, I'm being serious.

Once we have AI, it will solve everything else.

It only emerged as this weekend went on that the theme of all our talks was meant to be optimism.

Because as I was listening to all these talks, I thought, yeah, they are a bit kind of upbeat.

I don't like this.

It's all very

upbeat.

But the keynote speaker at the end was Stephen Hawking, who came on and said, I warn you now about AI.

It could kill us all.

And because he was Stephen Hawking, people wouldn't go, keep it light, keep it light.

Have you read the right?

You know, it's meant to be upbeat.

He just did a 20-minute kind of, in his own unique way, of, you know, if you don't keep tabs on this thing, it could destroy us.

Thank you very much.

And good night.

I've been Stephen Hawking.

Good night.

And so the end, I don't think they could lodge the fireworks at the end of that because everyone left feeling very, very despondent and a little bit depressed.

that's that's that's a great weekend i went to a google sponsored weekend once of talks and they had the pollster us pollster frank luntz who you may have oh yes uh-huh who has got built in his house this is the kind of thing you can do in america where houses are much larger an entire replica oval office

just just for him i don't know i'm presuming he shows people around it but i'm sure every so often he must just go and sit at the big desk and just pretend to be president.

Every morning I get up and do 100 executive orders.

Yeah, I know.

I just think, what a great, I mean, that is truly living your dream.

That's like having a kind of ball pool installed in your house or something.

Just go, oh, I made it.

Like, this is how I know that I've made it.

Yeah.

I've got my own resolution.

What I love doing just before lunch is ordering someone to be assassinated.

Drone strike from my fake office.

It's great.

You talked about rot economy.

Yeah.

And that reminds me of something that my daughter...

showed me who understands the way the internet works far more succinctly than me.

So big up to Carmella.

Do you remember the Willy Wonka nightmare that was Wonka Winter Wonderland in Glasgow?

And it was just a big warehouse that was cold and full of crying children.

And one sad umper lumper.

A sad imper, just being, I don't know what I'm doing here.

I've just been paid to sit here and be an oomper lump.

She was saying, actually, it's possible to put on something like that and make a lot of money because what you do is you're generating the story, and the money is then made from all the social media response to that story.

That somehow you start getting, you know, micro pennies off.

But if it really takes off, you can make a fortune.

And all the marketing materials for that exhibition were designed by AI.

So somebody said, you know, what if a terrible one

display was put on in Glasgow?

What would it look like?

You know, so it is now possible.

It's a bit like, you know, an updated version of the producers where they find out if they put on a terrible show, they can make a lot of money.

If you actually can come up with a dreadful story that catches a lot of attention because it's dreadful, do you know what?

That does lead me to one of my words of the year, which I think is a very useful thing to understand the modern internet, which is rage bait, which is content that is deliberately designed to make you angry.

So, you will often see, and people just do it all the time, the classic one being a sort of woman, blonde, attractive blonde woman in her late 30s, going, you know, it's amazing that I don't have kids.

I'm so happy.

I get up in the morning whenever I want to, and I go on loads of horror on holidays a year.

And of course, what you get is 300,000 angry people going, you'll die alone, you'll never know happiness.

You know, it won't be so fun, will it, when you rotted away in a care home.

And of course, so therefore she makes a lot of money, but every time she therefore her prediction of her lifestyle becomes true.

Exactly.

She's paying for the many holidays she can go on during term time with the proceeds of people being fuming about it.

So do you think us now giving away this the key to online success is going to lead to a rapid rise in radio four-centered radio four centered what you could say?

Extremism.

I actually think that the Arches is deeply overrated, that I don't even like sourdough bread.

I've not heard past the first three notes of the tune, the theme tune.

Well, this is the kind of thing that will have

some sort of huge alarm has gone off in BBC compliance.

My wife Rachel told me that when she grew up, she thought The Archers was like really dirty

because all she would hear is da, da, da, and I'm just switching it off as if that's not for you.

We'll not have that filth in this house.

And she just thought it was like that.

And then she started listening to it and thought it was really disappointing.

There was no filth whatsoever.

Just cows and fanning permission.

Yeah.

I think it will help people, though, because so often when you are triggered, which is another modern word, by something on the internet, you should think, hang on a minute, is this person trying to get a rise out of me?

And is giving them attention what they want?

And therefore, actually, the power move in that situation is to simply go about my day, not give them a second thought rather than fall for it.

Okay, well, I wonder whether, given that, I should leap straight in with one of my favourite phrases from the year, a fairly recent one, which is hot assassin.

Which

again is one of these stories that some of your your great Gavrilo Princep content.

It's about Luigi Mangioni, the let's face it, the person alleged to have killed someone.

He's been charged with the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, a private medical insurance boss in the US.

And this has kind of therefore gone into the whole discourse in America about a huge amount of resentment from people about the kind of costs of private healthcare and the ability, because it's an insurance-based system, to have your claim denied.

So, therefore, he's been sort of remarketed by the online erati as actually not an assassin, but a you know, a maverick, maverick, a disruptor.

A folk hero.

A folk hero, a kind of a Robin Hood, if you will, if Robin Hood actually shot arrows into his enemies' eyes, as opposed to just taking money from them.

Whereas in fact, he's someone alleged to have broken the law quite seriously.

But it's interesting how

they're talking about him being the hot assassin.

I don't know why they, I mean, I know why they're calling him the hot assassin.

Hot shot, but it would be better.

He's not an unattractive young man.

And the phrasing has now come up because

someone, no trending is the phrase, if the guy is fit, you must acquit.

As if somehow.

Which is a riff on the O.J.

Simpson trial, right?

Which is the if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit.

Yes, that's right.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

If his looks are undisputed, he must not be executed.

That sort of.

Everyone joining.

It's a family fun competition now.

But that's an interesting

kind of example, I guess, about the fact that it's almost impossible for people to take things seriously on the internet.

And I think that does speak to the idea of modern politics.

It definitely appeals to, I think, lots of Trump voters is the sense that when you've often talked to people and you will reference actual Trump policies, and his supporters say, but he's not going to do that, there's an understanding that he's almost sort of like president, ironically.

And I think that this has been the same treatment.

He's taken something really abhorrent, like a murder, but people are treating it as if it's actually just content

really happened.

This is a real thing, and now they're sort of walking it back from reality.

And either he's, you know, he's like a Robin Hood or he's a good avenger, as it were, or he's somehow

he's very considerate, you know.

He, because apparently, he thought about having a bomb, but then that might kill innocent people.

So that's nice.

You know, he had them in mind.

He was caught in a McDonald's eating hash brands, which is a peak American killer.

That's right.

He had a 3D printed weapon, so he's sourcing local material.

He's not, you know, that's right.

And he used a silencer because he was conscious of noise and didn't want to wake people up.

You know, that kind of, so it suddenly becomes like a, you know, not a folk hero, but a woke hero.

I thank you very much.

Good night.

Well, the interesting thing about that to me is the whole reaction has an equal opposite reaction.

There was a lot of discussion on the right about how could people take murder so lightly?

How could you champion somebody who killed somebody?

At exactly the same time that some of the luminaries of the American right were meeting a guy called Daniel Penny.

Now, he is a guy who there was a homeless man acting out on the subway, threatening to kill people, and he got him in a chokehold and he held the chokehold for so long that the other man died.

And that to me seems like a really tragic case.

He was put to trial.

He eventually was acquitted.

But after that, post hoc, he was then hailed as a sort of American hero.

Yeah.

And that he was a kind of, again, an avenger.

He was standing up to this menace of anti-social behaviour on the subway.

And whatever you think about what he did and whether or not it was right to put him on trial, it is a bit strange to say that's heroic, because he could have let go of that chokehold considerably sooner.

Exactly.

And there was a January 6th, you know, invasion of Congress in which somebody died and which a lot of people were hurt and injured.

Yeah, I think what we've kind of learned from both those cases is that people are a lot more casual about political violence if it comes from people they think are correct.

You know, in the same situation, I think it was a woman got off from milkshaking, as another recent word that we hear.

But milkshaking Nigel Farage.

Now, I just think we should treat attacks on politicians really seriously.

A couple of them have died in kind of recent years.

But there is a kind of feeling of like how you feel about these events depends on your starting politics of you and the person who's committed them.

Well, there is that thing now of you're going back to the kind of how politics pushes into more extreme positions.

That sense sense of the cause that you really believe in is so important that actually, if the only way to triumph is through non-political means like violence and so on, the proportion of people who believe that has now gone up.

That now, something like in America, 30% of people believe that in particular causes justify physical force.

Yeah, I'm not surprised.

So, yeah.

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Here's a handbreak turn.

Did you have a brat summer?

I still haven't really got to the bottom of what that means.

I know

it means, isn't it the modern equivalent of bad, as in good?

Is that right?

I think the best way to understand it is it's a bit like, if you remember the 90s, do you remember the sort of Laadette era?

So Charlie XEX, who coined this phrase, said it was a bit like, you know, sort of smoking Marlborough Reds and wearing a vest top without a bra and being kind of messy.

But the reason it became a political phrase is that she also tweeted when Kamala Harris took over the Democratic nomination for president, Kamala Harris is Brat.

Yes, that's right.

Which led, was the kind of tweet that launched a thousand think pieces.

Yes.

Until it turned out.

And swept her into victory.

No, it turned out on November 5th that she was update.

Camela Harris is not Brat.

Oh, and on that point, then, I think we should turn the page on the phrase, turn the page.

Turn the page.

Because in the end.

She turns the torch.

Yes.

And turn the page.

Just shut up.

That was the word of the year from the Collins English Dictionary.

Whereas Merriam-Webster went with polarisation, which I've

no disrespect if you're listening, people, at Merriam-Webster Dictionary, but have you checked the date on the calendar recently?

We've been talking about that one for quite some time.

Well, another couple that came up were manifest, as in to manifest, that thing of the power of positive thinking turning into something where you are really convinced that if you want it, it will happen.

There's a cod scientific woo behind it in one of the popular science books, which is if you kind of think about something a lot that you want to happen, then you're sort of envisioning it and then you're subconsciously soaking it in, which is, I mean, it's not going to harm anybody, but it reminds me of nothing so much as do you remember Noel Edmund's cosmic ordering?

Yes, yes.

It's basically Noel Edmond's Cosmic Ordering, is it not?

Where he's just like, but I thought about how I wanted to host Deal or No Deal, and then someone offered me Deal or No Deal.

Amazing how that works.

And even poor old Noel's agent must have been like, I worked you really hard to get that gig.

Yeah.

And it just touched on that thing that there is an awful lot of, and I'm not wanting to, you know, decry the likes of Strictly strictly come dancing and so on, that thing of, you know, you can be whatever you want to be, you know, you can do whatever you want.

And it's great.

I'm always, I'm naturally an optimist and I think that's great.

And I think we all have abilities and talents and we should really, but, but for some people, it doesn't happen.

And I worry that we put a lot of pressure on anyone now who finds themselves in a difficult situation.

And instead of going, how can we help?

It's more...

Come on, you can do it.

Yeah, you know, we know you can.

If you wanted it enough, you'd be able to have it.

Yes, that implication, oh, you don't want it then, since it didn't happen.

You know, that does worry me that it slightly puts the pressure back and the onus back on the person who

is in the original difficult situation.

Yeah, I think it does.

If it feels quite sort of, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, which never really acknowledges that some people's bootstraps are a lot more reinforced than others.

Yes.

And I think, you know, one of the good side of it, I suppose, is the idea that you actually, if you want to make things achieve things in your life, you probably have to work quite hard at them.

They don't just kind of come to you.

You have to really decide that you want them and go for it.

And as I say, I don't want to decry the value of optimism and positive thinking.

And of course, that plays a major part.

You know, attitude, your attitude to something always plays an important part in it.

But it's manifest throws everything at that point, doesn't it?

It's like, you know, if you just think positively enough, magically, your worries will go away.

Yeah, I think it led to one of the great hits of the sum, which I'm sure you heard when you were at Every Nightclub, which was the, there was a hop, there was a TikTok that said, I'm looking for a man in finance, six foot, blue eyes, and then someone turned it into a great club remix.

But this was this idea that you could essentially manifest the perfect man by just thinking about him enough.

Or manifest.

I think Rachel Reids is looking at manifesting over the next 12-month period.

Manifest some money.

In terms of...

Yeah, manifest an NHS that works.

Were you very mindful, very demure?

Oh, I've always been both.

Good, okay, good.

What does very mindful mean other than

being aware of stuff?

I think that's really good to be aware of your surroundings.

I find that better than not.

Otherwise you bang into things.

It was, again, it was someone recording this in their car and they said the way that they dressed for work was very mindful.

And I think the line was, I show off my cheechy but not my chatcha, which is great dress code advice at any time of day.

And of course, because it's the internet, when Pornhub released their words in review of the year,

which is up there with the OED for me, they said that searches for demure had in fact spiked immediately after that became a meme.

Oh, demure.

But didn't she try and then copyright that phrase?

Oh, Mindful and Demure, because somebody else had.

Absolutely.

Before she could make money out of it.

Not that she was planning to, but she found that someone else had bought it.

Yes.

I mean, there was a lot of sort of make-up brands leaned into it and stuff.

And indeed, the Hawk Tour girl managed to turn her catchphrase into a podcast, Talk Tour, and then a meme coin.

But

it's boxing day.

Let's leave that one, shall we?

Do you have any other

Sausages was always uh it was an interesting one from kiostama at his first conference speech as prime minister again and he was talking about the hostages in gaza the israeli hostages but it came out as sausages i watched it actually because there was a lot of commentary on it afterwards i mean he said sausages over applause so you can hardly hear it but in you know folk memory are you a sausage truther do you think he was wronged you were watching the zapria flip say it but in in sort of collective memory it he didn't go and the return of the sausages, the hostages, instead of saying, which is what he said, in folk memory, it's become the return of the sausages.

I mean, the hostages.

And it's funny how the memory plays tricks on you like that.

Oh, that definitely happens.

I think one of the things when I'm doing journalism, I think about all the time, is you have to resist the way that your mind will try and make stories better.

And you have to go back to the actual facts of things and go and make sure you haven't just smoothed and polished off little bits.

Because that's the thing that your brain does without you even knowing about it.

Yes, but that's because you you are a proper journalist and the internet doesn't really work like that, you know, in that no, it's more vibes.

Vibes, no, that's a word, that's an old word, but that is such a current word.

That is a current word.

Everything is vibe, no, as if vibe is more important than fact.

I think we just have to acknowledge that's probably true.

I mean, I don't think I want it to be true, but I think it probably is true.

I obviously spent the autumn in the US covering the US election.

That means I got to hear a lot about the late, great Hannibal Lecter,

which was one of Donald Trump's most frequent campaign riffs, as well as whether or not you'd like to rather be eaten by a shark or electrocuted.

But he knows these are being discussed.

He mentions them in each speech, knowing that the audience are waiting for him to say it.

Oh, he's like a very kind of...

surrealist stand-up comedian.

Yeah.

Right.

He just does so many speeches.

I think that's the places where he's happiest, is sort of performing.

And so he just gets the feedback and develops it.

But yeah, I mean, you know, it's a very overtly sort of nationalistic, very incredibly right-wing things.

And then he would then mix it in with a sort of complaint for a bit about Whoopi Goldberg and how her joke routine was too blue at Mar-a-Lago.

But late great, that's not the case, is it?

I mean, I know Hannibal Lecture is a fiction, but in the film,

in the Hannibal Lecture canon, he's not dead.

Is he?

No, I believe he ends the book Hannibal, in fact, running off with Clarice Starlin.

So there we go, you see.

So where does the late great come from?

In Trump's head, what exactly has happened in

the Hannibal lecture universe?

And do we want to know?

A question for the ages.

We'll simply never know.

I'm going to nominate my word of the year, which I'm not sure will be familiar to our audience.

Maybe it will be, which is raw dogging.

Now, much like skeet.

Was this on the porn hub words of the year?

Funny you should say that.

It does have an original, slightly adult meaning.

But what it became to be used from was that if you're a man on a flight, it became a competitive pastime to spend as long as possible not watching any films, not listening to anything.

I think maybe you were possibly allowed to watch the map.

Okay.

But this was raw dogging the flight.

Why?

Well, so it's become a term.

It's become a term for kind of having a pure encounter with the natural world, not distracting yourself.

Okay.

But the natural world you're in.

It's an airplane.

But a kind of endurance thing.

The US journalist Taylor Lorenz, formerly of the Washington Post, is still very worried about COVID.

She still wears a a mask.

And she said, you know, I make sure I'm still masked and stuff, whereas other people are out there just raw dogging the air.

And it was just one of my phrases of the year, because it has this sort of sense of, she's basically disgusted with the act of breathing.

Okay.

And it's now been recast as raw dogging the air.

But I guess, correct me if I'm wrong, I guess an essential part of the process of rogue dogging is to then tell everyone that you've done it.

Otherwise, otherwise why?

It hasn't happened, as it were.

The ad sales executive, and I think very interesting thinker Rory Sutherland has this theory tell me if you think this is true he thinks that a lot of men have what he calls a sort of like standby mode he thinks that it's a lot easier and among men that he knows they just sort of power down gently you know which is why maybe they like things like fishing yes no I get that but that's that's about mindfulness isn't it

it's sort of um you know being aware of the present and just pausing for a second not thinking about what you're going to do next and what you what's you know not thinking about your career not mulling over the past and think oh i felt i'd done that just being in the present being in location and just appreciating what's around you whereas raw dogging sounds a filthy and also in the end boring you know do you know what though i do and i would i would love to hear from listeners whether or not i'm the only freak that does this i quite enjoy watching the map Yes, no, I absolutely understand that.

But, you know, not for eight hours.

Not for eight hours.

I do, I'm very much in favor of doing nothing.

I love the idea of doing nothing.

But do you actually, because you're quite a sort of vibrating string of a person, do you actually

ever actually do nothing?

I do.

I mean, I don't, not for like great quantities of time, you know, beyond, you know, a week or so, but every now and then, if I'm looking at what's happening today and then there's like an hour in the schedule of the day, then I think nothing, I actually don't think, oh, good, I can do all my emails.

I go, oh, good, I can do nothing.

And I rather enjoy that.

Oh, I envy that.

This is the worst intro to an anecdote ever.

But when who's who got in contact to ask about my intro?

I get you.

I know.

I'm really sorry.

Obviously, one of the things you have to fill in is your hobbies.

Yes.

And I just put more work.

I'm sorry.

It's like video games, more work.

I just, I am the person who thinks, oh, I wonder.

Hello, is that the journalist, Helena Lewis?

We notice one of your hobbies is more work.

We just wondered if you could come into our company.

That sounds incredibly tragic.

Would you like to, yeah, would you like to think about your life decisions?

Oh, well, on that note, look,

let's wrap this up.

Do you have, from all of that?

Do you want to do you have a one?

Well, I, you know, my favorite I haven't mentioned yet, and only happened this week, which is peak sewage.

I heard someone that seems like very talk about the episodes theme, optimistic to think we might have reached that.

Yes.

So, this was a spokesperson for the body that's meant to oversee the water companies.

And

that's a whole new, um, a whole new set,

a whole new tranche of requirements have come into play.

Tranche is a good word.

That's been, that's, yeah, we can go into that at another time.

And then, so the spokesperson said, and therefore, I think we, I think it's realistic to say we've, we've now reached peak sewage, as in it gets better from here.

But peak anything is always a disturbing idea.

But the idea of peak sewage

is not what I want to leave all our Christmas listeners with.

It's a tsunami of effluent, isn't it?

So I don't know if you have one to get us out of that hideous quagmire that we...

I'm not sure I can.

In that case, I'm going to go back and say, I think just in terms of the sheer number of think pieces generated in political terms,

Kamala Harris is brat.

And the idea of a brat summer and then Charlie XCX declaring that brat summer is over.

We're now in, you know, whatever it was, sad autumn.

But I'm going to go with brat as my word of the year.

Okay.

Brat and peak sewage.

Merry Christmas.

Okay, well, thanks for listening to Strong Message Here.

We'll be back next week with, and here's a phrase I don't use that often, a listener mailbag special.

That's all for now.

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Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner.

I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy show that takes history seriously.

And we are back for series 8, starting with a live episode recorded at the Hay Literary Festival, all about the history of the medieval printed book in England.

Our comedian there is Robin Ince.

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Then it's off to Germany in the 1920s for an episode on LGBTQ life in Weimar, Germany with Jordan Gray.

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