Turns out that some languages are less intelligible through a mask than others, and, believe it or not, it all depends on how often you use certain consonants. It’s called the McGurk effect and it’s the closest that linguistics comes to actual magic.* FULL TRANSCRIPT *From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter and you know, in line with the fact that the Booksmart version of Lexicon Valley is going to be somewhat more topical than the Grand Old version, I want to discuss something that I've tried not to get too much into because of my motto that life is always happy in the valley and that is the pandemic, especially since it could be argued that we're coming out of it. And I feel a little better about referring to it at length. And I want to discuss language and the pandemic and beyond the level that some people started asking back about a year and a half ago. What about all of these new terms? And, you know, the answer is, well, you know, what about them? So social distancing, you can't do a show about that. Yes, we learned a bunch of new words and expressions. But still, the question is — especially, you know, a year and a half out — what kind of effect has there been on language from all of this stuff that we've had to go through? And, you know, one of the first things that you might think about is these God-damned masks. What kind of effect does it have? For example, someone very near and dear to me was talking about how when she goes to a store and she has to tell them whether or not she's going to use credit or debit, well, when you're in there and everybody's masked, the cashiers have told her that it's hard to understand whether people are saying credit or debit because those two words differ only in their initial consonant, as we call it. So is it cr- or d-? There is no problem with that at all in normal life. But when you've got a piece of cloth in front of your mouth, it can be somewhat muffled and you can't make up for that by looking at people's mouths and doing a little bit of passive lip reading as we all do, whether we're conscious of it or not. So credit, debit, what did you say? And so, my sweetheart tells me that she walks into the store and she has to actually enunciate or shout credit or debit. What's going on with that?THE McGURK EFFECTDo these masks actually muffle speech in that way? Do they create a kind of a confusion? And, you know, we would expect that they would. They certainly are. And one way that we know it is that linguists are aware of something called the McGurk effect. And the McGurk effect is one of these things where you can have fun in a class showing people that linguistics can be magic. And what it is, is that if you show a video clip of somebody saying gah, but then what you play them saying is not gah, but bah — you have those two things going on — the person is with their mouth saying gah, but you play them saying bah, what an Anglophone does when they see that is they could swear to God that the person is saying dah. You watch somebody mouthing gah, you play them saying bah. Well then what you hear is not bah and you don't hear gah, what you hear is dah. And what's especially fascinating is that those consonants, the b, d and the g, have a certain relationship in terms of how pronunciation actually works. So forget the order that those things come in in the alphabet. It's not about b first and then d and then g. It's actually more interesting than that. And the alphabetical order is actually only accidentally consonant, haha so to speak, with how this works. B is with your lips, d is when you put your tongue on that alveolar ridge, that thing that you burn if you drink your hot cocoa too fast, then g is the soft palate. So front, middle, back, b front, d middle, g back. So what happens is if you see somebody speaking the back, gah, and then what's played is them doing the front, bah, you end up correcting it to what's actually in bet