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Speaker 1: Welcome to the show, Friends and neighbors. My favorite letter

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Speaker 1: of the English alphabet is Z, and my name is Ben,

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Speaker 1: my name is Noel, and I my favorite song is

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Speaker 1: the ABC song and uh. For the purposes of today's episode,

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Speaker 1: it goes like this, A B D E, F G

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Speaker 1: H I, K L, M N O, P R S

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Speaker 1: t U V z APP. I don't know how to

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Speaker 1: pronounce these characters. Think of characters, right, Ben Franklin, boy,

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Speaker 1: and also Noel, you laughed at me. We were hanging

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Speaker 1: out yesterday and I tried singing that song with this uh. Folks,

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Speaker 1: you may notice that in the rendition of the alphabet

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Speaker 1: song you just heard, there were some prominent letters missing.

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Speaker 1: And it turns out that's not an accident. This was

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Speaker 1: on purpose. You see. There was a fellow, a founding

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Speaker 1: father named Benjamin Franklin who did many, many things right.

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Speaker 1: He was a renaissance man. He was Polly Maath of sorts,

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Speaker 1: a genius. Most people consider him um an elder statesman

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Speaker 1: and as you say, founding father, but also an inventor,

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Speaker 1: a scientist, a postmaster, and a diplomat. And he just

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Speaker 1: kind of did all the things. And today he is

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Speaker 1: um sort of an American legend, and there are a

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Speaker 1: lot of stories about the guy that turn out later

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Speaker 1: not to be entirely true, you know, but it is

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Speaker 1: true that he was a prolific renaissance man. As an inventor.

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Speaker 1: He created things like by vocals, he created the lightning rod,

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Speaker 1: He created us some swimming flippers, sets for hands, flexible catheters,

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Speaker 1: which is weird that there was a time when they

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Speaker 1: were inflexible catheters, I know, and the ode dometer. But

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Speaker 1: one of the things that people might not know about

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Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin is that in addition to inventing things, he

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Speaker 1: also improved a lot of things, or tempted to. And

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Speaker 1: one of the things that he attempted to improve was

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Speaker 1: the English language itself. Yeah, and it's like, you know,

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Speaker 1: we we all know that odometers are around still, swimming

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Speaker 1: flippers are around, still, bifocals, no one's really made them

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Speaker 1: much better than than than old Ben Franklin. But you know,

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Speaker 1: we don't really hear much about a redone English alphabet

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Speaker 1: that that sticks around to this day, and that's because

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Speaker 1: it was a bit of a flop. But before we

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Speaker 1: get into its ridiculous, abysmal failure, let's talk a little

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Speaker 1: bit about what this thing was. Ben, absolutely no, do

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Speaker 1: you recall hooked on Phonics? Were hooked on filens kid?

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Speaker 1: It worked for me? There we go. Yeah, Hooked on

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Speaker 1: Phonics was this program in the US, at least in

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Speaker 1: the US, possibly in other places. Uh, that taught children

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Speaker 1: how to pronounce letters and combinations of letters in English

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Speaker 1: based on sounding them out. It worked so well for me, though,

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Speaker 1: that I ended up in phonics rehab. Oh yeah, you

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Speaker 1: had to. I had a problem. I had a real

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Speaker 1: phonics problem. Monkey on my back. But I'm cool now. Yeah. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I don't pronounce anything correctly. It's one day at a time, right.

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Speaker 1: So Ben Franklin invented a phonetic alphabet. He did successfully

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Speaker 1: invent this. He hoped that other people would be fans

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Speaker 1: of the invention and that this alphabet would ultimately replace

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Speaker 1: the alphabet we used today, and he started by removing letters.

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Speaker 1: He did um. Franklin's alphabet basically acted six letters, and

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Speaker 1: those were C, J Q, double you, X, and Y.

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Speaker 1: You'll notice they were missing from my little alphabet ditty

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Speaker 1: at the beginning of the show because he thought they

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Speaker 1: were redundant. Right. He argued that For example, the letter

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Speaker 1: K could handle the hard C sounds, so no need

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Speaker 1: for C. You can use okay for that. And then

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Speaker 1: the letter S could give a soft C sound, so

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Speaker 1: C was gone. Um. And then he also added six

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Speaker 1: more characters, which, for for my money, we are unpronounceable.

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Speaker 1: When you see them, they look like something out of

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Speaker 1: the necronomicon UM, but they were pretty functional um. From

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Speaker 1: Franklin's perspective. There were basically two vowels and four new consonants,

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Speaker 1: and his idea was to add clarity in pronunciation, and

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Speaker 1: his characters were specifically based around sounds. So, for example,

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Speaker 1: he had a new consonant that made the en g

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Speaker 1: sound um at the end of like running or or

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Speaker 1: or reaping or seeking. Right, Yeah, you can see you

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Speaker 1: can see the gist or the simplification, or at least

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Speaker 1: the well intentioned steps towards simplification. Franklin worked on this

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Speaker 1: for a long time. He initially developed the alphabet in

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Speaker 1: seventeen sixty eight, but he didn't start publishing it or

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Speaker 1: or floating it around until a little more than ten

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Speaker 1: years later in seventeen seventy nine. UM. He also published

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Speaker 1: some letters that he had written in this language, and

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Speaker 1: in seventeen eighty nine, Noah Webster, who had heard of

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Speaker 1: Franklin's proposal, included a description of it in his book

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Speaker 1: Dissertations on the English Language. However, there was a problem. Webster,

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Speaker 1: you see, did not have the correct type blocks because

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Speaker 1: at the time they had to use blocks, handcut blocks

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Speaker 1: for printing presses, and he couldn't really describe the alphabet.

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Speaker 1: Webster couldn't because he didn't have those special six characters

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Speaker 1: cut out in a block, so he couldn't really illustrate

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Speaker 1: Franklin's changes, and the alphabet itself really didn't you know.

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Speaker 1: People didn't get it or see it in action until

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Speaker 1: Franklin had new blocks cast to print the alphabet for

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Speaker 1: his seventeen seventy nine collection called Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces.

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Speaker 1: It's interesting too, because Webster was one of the very

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Speaker 1: very few uh supporters of this new alphabet UM, because

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Speaker 1: he was all about UM standardizing American spelling, and this

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Speaker 1: was a big thing for Franklin too. He argued that

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Speaker 1: his alphabet would help people spell better, would would reduce

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Speaker 1: spelling errors. UM. And it's interesting there are a few

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Speaker 1: letters that Franklin exchanged with his friend and confidante, Polly Stevenson,

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Speaker 1: who was the daughter of his landlady in London. And

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Speaker 1: you know he gave her away at her wedding, and

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Speaker 1: it was a very important person in his life. And

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Speaker 1: she had some interesting objections to UM this new alphabet,

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Speaker 1: and here Um Franklin responds to a few of them. Um,

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Speaker 1: I give you a quote from this letter. Here. The

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Speaker 1: objection you make to rectifying our alphabet, that it will

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Speaker 1: be attended with inconveniences and difficulties, is a natural one,

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Speaker 1: for always occurs when any reformation is proposed, whether in religion,

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Speaker 1: government laws, and even down as low as roads and

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Speaker 1: wheel carriages. The true question then is not whether there

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Speaker 1: will be no difficulties or inconveniences, but whether the conveniences

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Speaker 1: will not, on the whole, be greater than the inconveniences.

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Speaker 1: So you know, the whole making Omelet you gotta break

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Speaker 1: a few eggs argument right right. It's asking people a

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Speaker 1: lot to change the way that they speak and write.

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Speaker 1: Because if you've ever looked into um an Encyclopedia entry

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Speaker 1: and you've seen the pronounce ciation guide, you know where

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Speaker 1: they have the strange characters and tell you this is

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Speaker 1: a glottal sound is yeah, yeah, the unstressed central vale

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Speaker 1: build upside downy in the International Phonetic Alphabet. When when

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Speaker 1: you see that, you can if you're not familiar with

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Speaker 1: pronunciation guides, then you can kind of get a sense

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Speaker 1: of how someone would feel reading a letter in Ben

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Speaker 1: Franklin English versus you know English English totally. And when

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Speaker 1: you read some of these exerts that he wrote in

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Speaker 1: this alphabet, your brain kind of has to kind of

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Speaker 1: like do a some gymnastics to even parse that file.

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Speaker 1: And once it does, it does kind of click for you.

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Speaker 1: It's really interesting the way you can make that leap.

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Speaker 1: But another interesting criticism from Franklin's friend Polly Stevenson was

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Speaker 1: the idea that changing the language would obscure etymology of

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Speaker 1: words and their meaning. Uh and Franklin could not disagree more.

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Speaker 1: His response was this, um, etymologies are at present very uncertain,

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Speaker 1: but such as they are, the old books would still

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Speaker 1: preserve them, an etymologists would there find them. Words in

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Speaker 1: the course of time change their meaning as well as

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Speaker 1: their spelling and pronunciation, and we do not look to

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Speaker 1: etymology for their present meanings. Um. So he really had

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Speaker 1: a deep philosophical belief that this was the right thing

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Speaker 1: to do. And it's interesting because, you know, we talked

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Speaker 1: about at the top of the show what a renaissance

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Speaker 1: man Franklin was and all the things he invented. But

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Speaker 1: one of his biographers kind of referred to this whole

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Speaker 1: exercise as taking Franklin's passion for social improvement to radical

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Speaker 1: extremes right. And one of the reasons that he did

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Speaker 1: find some prominent supporters is because there was an ideological

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Speaker 1: and political aspect to the generation of this language, or

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Speaker 1: the revision of the language from across the Atlantic. In

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Speaker 1: his Peace in seventeen eighty nine, Noah Webster argues, the

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Speaker 1: following cheval circumstances render future separation of the American tongue

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Speaker 1: from the English necessary and unavoidable. I'm doing a Webster voice.

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Speaker 1: Numerous slibrical causes, such as a new country, new associations

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Speaker 1: of people, new combinations of ideas and arts and science,

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Speaker 1: and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will

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Speaker 1: introduce new words to the American tongue. So he was

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Speaker 1: arguing that Ben Franklin's concept was timely and prescient, and

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Speaker 1: that American English would need to have the opportunity to

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Speaker 1: become its own thing. And we do see, we do

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Speaker 1: see different versions of the English language dividing, you know,

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Speaker 1: at least in terms of slang or figures of speech.

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Speaker 1: But this idea was radical. This, this idea was paving

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Speaker 1: the way for a written version of American English to

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Speaker 1: be unintelligible to another English speaker. And to Franklin, language

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Speaker 1: um was speech before writing. And then in a lot

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Speaker 1: of ways, writing was sort of an inconvenient byproduct of language.

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Speaker 1: It was just like a thing you had to do

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Speaker 1: to preserve stories and data and such. But it was

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Speaker 1: ultimately a byproduct and not the first and foremost concern

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Speaker 1: to Franklin, at least right. Another quote from one of

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Speaker 1: these letters to Polly Stevenson addressed her third objection, which

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Speaker 1: was that all books already written would become useless. And

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Speaker 1: you know to that, and I agree with this Franklin response.

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Speaker 1: This inconvenience would only come on gradually in a course

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Speaker 1: of ages, Um, you and other now living readers would

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Speaker 1: hardly forget the use of them. People would long learn

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Speaker 1: to read the old writings though they practiced the new.

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Speaker 1: And the inconvenience is not greater than what has actually

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Speaker 1: happened in a similar case in Italy. And you know

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Speaker 1: that's been formally Italians spoken wrote in Latin. Doesn't mean

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Speaker 1: that they burned all the books that were in Latin.

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Speaker 1: They're still even today around here people that speak Latin

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Speaker 1: and that do translations. And translations becomes a very important

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Speaker 1: thing because you know, you have to know the original

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Speaker 1: language and the context and be able to translate the

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Speaker 1: nuances of it. Um. So you know, I mean to

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Speaker 1: say that to reinvent a language is inherently bad, I

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Speaker 1: think as false agreed, especially if it is a living language.

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Speaker 1: A living language is defined as a language that has

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Speaker 1: living native speakers. And you know, we we know that

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Speaker 1: there are dead languages in the world unfortunately throughout history.

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Speaker 1: And we can see the written evidence of these languages.

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Speaker 1: I can hear them, reference to read them referenced in

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Speaker 1: other works of the same rough historical era. But we

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Speaker 1: don't know for sure how these sounded languages change over time.

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Speaker 1: One of my favorite things about American English is that

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Speaker 1: anything can be a verb. Anything could be a verb.

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Speaker 1: You just uh, just name something and then add I

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Speaker 1: n G and now it's a verba. Let's see walling.

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Speaker 1: You know, Ben Bullen ing Noel Brown ning, Yeah, exactly,

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Speaker 1: Noel Brown ending Noel Brown to the brown ing. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I think I think I added an extra syllable there.

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Speaker 1: But you know what, we're going to keep it. And

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Speaker 1: as ambitious as it might sound, you and I were

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Speaker 1: talking off air about the kind of chuts. But someone

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Speaker 1: would have to have to see there you go yecause

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Speaker 1: I would say hotspot living language of my friend's. So

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Speaker 1: how irritated does someone have to be by what is

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Speaker 1: essentially a tomato tomato argument? Uh? To say, I am

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Speaker 1: going to change the entire language. Everyone who's already speaking

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Speaker 1: this needs to conform to my expectations of what language

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Speaker 1: would be. There's a really interesting thing that happens. At

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Speaker 1: some point when most people are learning the basics of

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Speaker 1: a new language, there will typically be a moment where

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Speaker 1: they say, well, why do you do it that way?

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Speaker 1: That's dumb? Why Why does um? Why does every now

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Speaker 1: and have to have a gender attached to it or

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Speaker 1: something like that, And the answer is, because that's the language.

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Speaker 1: That's the way this language works, and it can feel,

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Speaker 1: it can feel kind of um. I don't know if

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Speaker 1: it's condescending or if it'sself centered for someone learning the

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Speaker 1: language to tell everybody else already speaking it that they're

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Speaker 1: doing it wrong and they should change for one person.

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Speaker 1: I think it's interesting too that one of Franklin's big

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Speaker 1: concerns in doing this alphabet was to eliminate spelling errors,

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Speaker 1: which I find utterly pedantic, you know, and absurd, because

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Speaker 1: again it's like, you know, if you're a purist, okay,

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Speaker 1: that's fine. If if you're a stickler for the spelling,

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Speaker 1: I get that, But ultimately, you know, what someone saying,

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Speaker 1: if the communication is successful, isn't a successful is it?

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Speaker 1: Isn't that what matters the most? And in fact, um,

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Speaker 1: you know, Webster actually persisted in published books, as you said,

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Speaker 1: using um a sort of adapted orthography that was I

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Speaker 1: believe it was not exactly Franklin's, but he sort of

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Speaker 1: used that as a jumping off point and developed something

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Speaker 1: of his own. And he was ridiculed by critics. And this,

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Speaker 1: this uh new language was called unsightly um and and

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Speaker 1: corrupting bastardization of the the proper English language. And that's

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Speaker 1: you know, that's another question, right, at what point is

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Speaker 1: it evolution? And at what point is it devolution. You know,

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Speaker 1: at what point are they deluding or ruining a language

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Speaker 1: versus improving, Because one alphabet entrepreneurs improvement is another alphabet entrepreneurs,

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Speaker 1: you know, downfall. They see it as the ruination of language.

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Speaker 1: And Noah Webster did succeed in creating an American spelling

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Speaker 1: but he did also eventually walk away from alphabet reform,

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Speaker 1: which he saw is a bit too radical. And it

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Speaker 1: turns out he was absolutely on the money about the

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Speaker 1: importance of political identity or you know, and in language.

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Speaker 1: And we see this happening in other countries as well.

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Speaker 1: There was a cool article in the Atlantic monthly magazine

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Speaker 1: uh In that talked about how alphabet shifts became common

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Speaker 1: in times of instability and former Soviet republics, for instance,

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Speaker 1: Alphabet shifts became so common that people started calling the

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Speaker 1: phenomenon new alphabet disease. So, you know, Azerbaijan is probably

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Speaker 1: the most famous example. They've changed the alphabet three times,

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Speaker 1: the whole thing. That's insane in the last hundred years.

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Speaker 1: How could you keep up Okay, hundred years, I guess

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Speaker 1: you got time to learn it. But even still that

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Speaker 1: seems very extreme because, like you said, it's so tied

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Speaker 1: to national identity, which I think is probably the main

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Speaker 1: reason that this this exercise from Mr Franklin just totally

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Speaker 1: fell flat. And he, you know, I'm getting this sensinel

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Speaker 1: that he was very much a spaghetti at the wall

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Speaker 1: kind of guy. He had stuff, he came up with,

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Speaker 1: he had idea, he just went for it. Did you

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Speaker 1: know that he even suggested that the eagle was not

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Speaker 1: an appropriate icon for America and that it should instead

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Speaker 1: be the turkey. Yes, yeah, the turkey, which I think

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Speaker 1: he said was a proud bird exactly. He said it

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Speaker 1: was a that the eagle was a bird of bad

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Speaker 1: moral character. So you out. Franklin was also a bit

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Speaker 1: of a troll, which I love, you know. But it's

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Speaker 1: like this whole alphabet thing. When you look at it

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Speaker 1: from an academic perspective and from the mind of a

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Speaker 1: brilliant thinker like Ben Franklin, you could see how maybe

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Speaker 1: he would think this was a good idea, but in

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Speaker 1: practice it's just too much of a pain in the ass,

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Speaker 1: right right it is. The people are very sensitive about language,

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Speaker 1: especially because we use it so often. Even if uh,

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Speaker 1: there were higher rates of illiteracy as there were in

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Speaker 1: this time people are still speaking, right, so we're consistently

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Speaker 1: using the rules of language, even if we're not using

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Speaker 1: the the written aspects of it. And that's why this

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Speaker 1: becomes important. Um for Azerbai shot just to like walk

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Speaker 1: through real quick what had happened was it went from

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Speaker 1: Arabic to Latin, then from Latin to Cyrillic. Uh. This

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Speaker 1: was Arabic to Latin nineteen twenties, Latin just really in

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Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, and then from Cyrillic to Latin again

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Speaker 1: most recently. And they're not alone. Uh. Former North Korean

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Speaker 1: leader or DPRK leader Kim Jong Il was lauded for

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Speaker 1: his quote immortal feats for unified development of national language

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Speaker 1: fearless leader. Yeah. He also rewrote the alphabet. They say

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Speaker 1: it sounds about right. What are you gonna do? What

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Speaker 1: else are you gonna do when you're at the top.

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Speaker 1: Are you trying to get a gift for that dictator

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Speaker 1: in your life who already has everything, get him an alphabet? Yeah? Well,

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Speaker 1: you know he's just trying out different haircuts and inventing

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Speaker 1: new alphabets. That's what you do. And people have tried

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Speaker 1: phonetic language is before in the past. There was a

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Speaker 1: guy we found named William Bullocar, a sixteenth century printer,

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Speaker 1: who created get this, a forty letter phonetic alphabet that

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Speaker 1: seems like too many letters, seems like what the what

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Speaker 1: was the function? The function was you know how Franklin

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Speaker 1: added those six new characters to indicate some groups of sounds.

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Speaker 1: This guy was doing some of the same stuff. There's

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Speaker 1: been a spade of this over time. People are constantly

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Speaker 1: trying to come up with their own version of the alphabet,

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Speaker 1: it seems, and it's kind of treated like cryptocurrency might

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Speaker 1: be a fad here today, gone tomorrow. But typically what

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Speaker 1: we see in the past is that when people try

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Speaker 1: to construct these phonetic languages, they do the same thing

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Speaker 1: Ben Franklin was doing. There. You know, they'll have one

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Speaker 1: letter that means I N G. At least Ben Franklin

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Speaker 1: was trying to simplify, and it's subtracting rather than adding knowe.

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Speaker 1: You know though, Ben uh, this still happening today, albeit

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Speaker 1: in in something of a fictional realm. Have you heard

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Speaker 1: of arabsh Is it a language from space? Ohh yes, Ben,

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Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, it is from a galaxy

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Speaker 1: far far away. In fact um. It first appeared on

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Speaker 1: like uh computer readouts or spaceship readouts in Return of

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Speaker 1: the Jedi UM, which is part of the original Star

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Speaker 1: Wars trilogy. And it was in the Death Star actually

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Speaker 1: um and one of Darth Vader's shuttles. This is all

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Speaker 1: according to wookie Pedia, which is a thing that I love. UM.

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Speaker 1: And then in the nineties a guy named Stephen Crane

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Speaker 1: kind of transcribed this alphabet for use in a Star

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Speaker 1: Wars miniature role playing game called Star Wars Miniature's Battle Companion,

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Speaker 1: and it was given the blessing of Lucasfilm and now

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Speaker 1: you can get it in font sets. It's a thirty

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Speaker 1: four letter alphabet UM. And it actually was expanded to

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Speaker 1: have punctuation marks in an update to the role playing

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Speaker 1: game that like a supplement that came out a few

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Speaker 1: years later. So you know, even Ben Franklin's the thing

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Speaker 1: didn't stick around. At least it perseveres in nerd culture absolutely.

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Speaker 1: And before you send the email, yes, we are very

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Speaker 1: aware that Tolkien himself was created languages. A lot of

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Speaker 1: times you will hear uh certain members of our cohort

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Speaker 1: here House of Works referred to Tolkien as a linguist

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Speaker 1: who made up a story to rationalize the languages he

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Speaker 1: was inventing. Is that what was used in the Peter

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Speaker 1: Jackson film when you see the etchings on the one

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Speaker 1: ring or whatever? Is that? Yeah? I think that's the

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Speaker 1: language of Mordor. That's right, that's right, that's right, that's

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Speaker 1: right exactly. And uh and yeah, the Elvish that they

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Speaker 1: speak was developed as an actual language. Look at and

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Speaker 1: and people are speaking cling on, people are doing marriage

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Speaker 1: officiations and cling on. Man, it's a brave new world,

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Speaker 1: my friend. And apparently George Bernard Shaw, famous playwright, had

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Speaker 1: a huge issue with the English language. Uh, so much

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Speaker 1: so that he one time, I don't entirely get this.

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Speaker 1: I want to see what you think of this. One

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Speaker 1: time he said that the word fish may as well

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Speaker 1: be written as g H O T I. The g

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Speaker 1: h is from laugh, the O from woman or women,

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Speaker 1: and the t i from nation. So he's saying the

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Speaker 1: way they fit together phonetically doesn't make sense. Yeah, And

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Speaker 1: he said the alphabet was hopelessly inadequate. And when he died,

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Speaker 1: he left money in his will to develop a new one,

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Speaker 1: one last like Shot from the Dark. I bet he

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Speaker 1: and Franklin and Webster would have would have been buddies.

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Speaker 1: I bet they would have been principle, but then they

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Speaker 1: probably would have started arguing. Yeah exactly. Uh. The George

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Speaker 1: Bernard Shaw competition attracted four hundred and sixty seven entries

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Speaker 1: and the winner was a guy named Kingsley Reed, who

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Speaker 1: had a phonetically accurate alphabet of forty eight letters, twenty

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Speaker 1: four vowels, and twenty four consonant. According to the clause

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Speaker 1: and Shaw's will, this alphabet had to be used alongside

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Speaker 1: the traditional alphabet in the new posthumous publications Play and

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Speaker 1: fifty three thousand copies of Andrew Cles and the Lion

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Speaker 1: were printed, and one copy was given to each public

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Speaker 1: library in Britain, the Commonwealth, and North and South America,

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Speaker 1: and to all the national libraries of the world. So

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Speaker 1: this book is out there and you can find that

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Speaker 1: award winning alphabet phonetic alphabet. It's called, of course, goatie fingers.

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Speaker 1: Goat fingers. Yeah, I know it sounds like something delicious

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Speaker 1: from a takeout menu. But goats had hooves, yes, but

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00:24:46,680 --> 00:24:53,320
Speaker 1: these are not goat exactly, These are gotee. So what

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00:24:53,600 --> 00:24:56,680
Speaker 1: are some other invented languages. I know that it seems

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Speaker 1: like so much that we I feel like we're cutting

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Speaker 1: it short, but I want to let you fly, Ben

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00:25:01,800 --> 00:25:05,440
Speaker 1: oh Man, Okay, yes, thank you for setting me up. There. No,

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Speaker 1: just briefly we have to mention Esperanto, which is one

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Speaker 1: of the world's most popular constructed auxiliary languages. It was

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Speaker 1: designed not to be necessarily a first language, but a

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Speaker 1: common tongue that anybody could speak, and it has like

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Speaker 1: two million speakers worldwide and a William Shatner starring movie,

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Speaker 1: if I'm not mistaken, right, Yes, his shining moment in

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00:25:29,240 --> 00:25:34,000
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixty six film Incubus, which my friends who

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00:25:34,040 --> 00:25:39,800
Speaker 1: speak Esperanto tell me is hilarious due to pronunciation. Sorry,

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Speaker 1: Mr sh they made us just event have us quote

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00:25:49,320 --> 00:25:59,879
Speaker 1: yet the last time? Three time? Yes sounds aloud. It

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00:26:02,040 --> 00:26:09,120
Speaker 1: sounds beautiful, right speaking of Renaissance men, Yes, exactly there.

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Speaker 1: And of course Ben Franklin is probably going to be

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Speaker 1: a recurring character in the story of Ridiculous History because

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00:26:16,720 --> 00:26:18,840
Speaker 1: he got up to some really weird stuff. He was

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00:26:18,880 --> 00:26:22,639
Speaker 1: a kinkster. Yes, yes, he was kickster. Uh. He was

396
00:26:22,720 --> 00:26:26,800
Speaker 1: a fan of air baths. People found skeletons, baths yeah,

397
00:26:27,000 --> 00:26:31,080
Speaker 1: is that like Airbnb? It could be in an Airbnb.

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00:26:31,800 --> 00:26:35,560
Speaker 1: It's uh, it's you know, it's reclining in the buff,

399
00:26:36,800 --> 00:26:41,080
Speaker 1: bathing in the air. He's hanging out naked. Oh okay,

400
00:26:41,480 --> 00:26:44,440
Speaker 1: why not just call it streaking. It was a different time.

401
00:26:46,200 --> 00:26:50,080
Speaker 1: He also made improvements to something called the glass harmonica,

402
00:26:50,240 --> 00:26:55,440
Speaker 1: which sounds super spooky. Uh and uh. Skeletons were found

403
00:26:55,600 --> 00:26:59,920
Speaker 1: under one of his old abodes. Not in his close

404
00:27:00,000 --> 00:27:03,000
Speaker 1: it though, No, no, no, not in this closet. He

405
00:27:03,080 --> 00:27:05,720
Speaker 1: was legit. He was legit. If anything, they were probably

406
00:27:05,800 --> 00:27:08,840
Speaker 1: medical experiments. But that's a story you and I will

407
00:27:08,880 --> 00:27:12,640
Speaker 1: have to research for another day. In the meantime, we'd

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00:27:12,760 --> 00:27:15,119
Speaker 1: like to hear from you. If you are listening to this,

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00:27:15,280 --> 00:27:17,320
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that

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00:27:17,440 --> 00:27:22,040
Speaker 1: you probably write stuff in English. What improvements would you

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00:27:22,200 --> 00:27:24,560
Speaker 1: make to the English language? And hey, if you happen

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00:27:24,600 --> 00:27:28,679
Speaker 1: to have invented your own improved English alphabet, write us

413
00:27:28,720 --> 00:27:32,200
Speaker 1: something in that. Send us your phonetic musings too ridiculous

414
00:27:32,280 --> 00:27:34,680
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com, or drop us a

415
00:27:34,760 --> 00:27:37,760
Speaker 1: note on Facebook, where we're also Ridiculous History, and we're

416
00:27:37,760 --> 00:27:42,000
Speaker 1: also on Instagram as Ridiculous History. Um. I've driven this

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00:27:42,119 --> 00:27:44,480
Speaker 1: pinterest joke into the ground, so I'm not even gonna

418
00:27:44,880 --> 00:27:46,840
Speaker 1: say it. All I'm gonna say is where we will

419
00:27:46,880 --> 00:27:49,760
Speaker 1: never have a Pinterest. We will never have a Pinterest. Well,

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00:27:49,840 --> 00:27:51,960
Speaker 1: let's put a pin in it. That's not a hard

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00:27:52,040 --> 00:27:58,040
Speaker 1: no yet I don't pin well as as Nolan. I

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00:27:58,400 --> 00:28:01,639
Speaker 1: resolve this. Uh we bid you Ado and hope you

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Speaker 1: will tune in again very soon for more ridiculous history.