#giant gretchen
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Kiss A Friend
Regina George x Reader
Word Count: 1k
Trigger Warnings: SMUT, MDNI. Regina fingering reader, Reader going down on Regina. Other Trigger Warnings include... secret relationships & getting caught. The fic definitely begins on the smut.
Request:
Hellloo! Please can I request Regina x reader are secret gf’s, neither are out yet until someone catches them together?
Mean Girls requests are open.
Discord | Roleplay
Regina pulled (Y/n) into a heated kiss as her hand slipped into her skirt. It had been like this for months. The two were the most popular girls in school, along with their friends Karen and Gretchen. However, nobody could expect that the power tension between them from their power dynamic wasn't due to a power struggle. It was sexual tension that was often relieved in the janitor's closet while they participated in quickies or heated make-out sessions. Neither of them was out yet, so times like these, hidden behind the janitor's doors were sacred to them.
(Y/n) moaned out Regina's name as her hand found their way into her hair. Her lips were beginning to swell at how hard Regina was kissing her, and she forgot how to breathe for a moment. She could cum for Regina right then and there in that closet with Regina's hands in her pants, rubbing her clit. Regina always knew how to make her orgasm fast, it was a skill that Regina had honed confidentially. As she helped (Y/n) reach her orgasm, her lips silenced the moans pouring off of (Y/n)'s lips. "Cum for me," she whispered before returning to kissing her deeply. The action caused (Y/n) to moan into Regina's mouth as she came easily onto her fingers.
(Y/n) caught her breath as Regina licked her fingers clean from (Y/n). Moving to her knees, (Y/n) hiked up Regina's mini-skirt and pulled down the girl's panties for access. Regina allowed this as her fingers tangled in (Y/n)'s hair. (Y/n) chose not to comment on how wet Regina was for her as she attached her lips to the blonde's clit, sucking on it in a way that made Regina's knees want to buckle. (Y/n) held onto Regina's thighs as she began to eat Regina ate as if she was her last meal on death row. Regina was living for it and her head fell back and her eyes fluttered close.
A moan left Regina's lips before she bit them to quiet herself down. She found herself already growing closer as (Y/n)'s tongue hit right where it needed to. As she grew closer to her orgasm, she had to force herself to stay standing as her legs shook. (Y/n) knew this was a tale-tell sign that Regina was close, so she sped up in the way Regina enjoyed. Moments later, Regina hit her climax, and (Y/n) used her tongue to clean her up with ease. As she rode out her high, Regina's grip on (Y/n)'s hair remained tight until she relaxed her breathing, though her heartbeat was still racing in her chest.
(Y/n) fixed Regina back up, readjusting Regina's skirt for her. Their lips connected again as their tastes mingled together on each other's lips and their teeth clashed due to how passionate their kisses were. They were so wrapped up in each other that they didn't hear the door open. Instead, they only heard a gasp and they pulled apart quickly in surprise. Standing there with her jaw slacked was Cady with Janis right behind her with a giant smirk. Regina quickly pushed Cady out of the room before closing the door with a curse. (Y/n) looked over to Regina with her brows furrowed, waiting to see what the blonde had to say.
"It's okay, they're not going to tell anyone," Regina spoke softly, knowing that they wouldn't. Cady was very kind, and Janis would never swing so low to hurt anyone. (Y/n) nodded a bit, running her hands through her tangled hair. She didn't know how to respond at the moment, her head still foggy from her orgasm but running a million miles an hour as she processed the fact that Cady and Janis had caught them.
Swallowing thickly, (Y/n) stood up straight. "If they tell people we were making out, I'll take the fall. I'll say that it wasn't you, but it was a girl. Me coming out will take the pressure off of you. I don't want you to feel like you have to come out just because they know." (Y/n) said, looking over to Regina. She knew Regina always struggled with telling people. They had been in a relationship for six months now, and the only people who knew were the two of them and (Y/n)'s dog (and now Cady and Janis). It kept things simple, and Regina liked simple, even if keeping their secret was complicated.
"I wouldn't ask you to do that," Regina had a new form of confidence forming in her chest. She fixed her hair and then moved to (Y/n), using her thumb to take off the smeared lipstick. (Y/n) knew the drill and did the same for (Y/n). "Can I ask you something? Are you ready to be out?"
(Y/n) nodded sheepishly in response. She had been ready, but she was patient. She didn't want to pressure Regina in any way. Nor did she want to make her feel like she had to come out. "If you're ready, I am, too. And, I wouldn't mind us two coming out together." Regina suggested with a soft smile as she held out her hand. (Y/n) smiled back as she took Regina's offer and the two left the closet together, fingers intertwined. And, automatically, everyone took note of the interaction.
Regina George and (Y/n) (L/n) were the school's new 'it' couple, and that was quickly established as they walked through the halls. Many people were jumping at the opportunity to get pictures or videos. Regina smiled over at (Y/n), who did the same as they made their way through the crowd unbothered. There was a new air around the two that screamed confidence on a higher level than before. Regina was proud to say that she came out with her girlfriend, and she felt relieved to not have to hide it. It was hard with Gretchen's need-to-know personality and the fact that Karen almost caught them several times.
But now, the two girls could officially say that they were free from the pressures of coming out, and they were now conquering the school together.
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Regina's Pretty Girl || PT. 2
Pairing: Regina George x fem!reader
Contains: Angst, mentions of alcohol use, Regina being world's best girlfriend, fluff, a TON of kissing, The jocks like trying to make reader drunk in order to hook up with them (idk if that makes sense), Reader being sensitive to loud noises, Reader being sort of a loser?? anything else I forgot!
Apologies for any spelling mistakes, English is not my first language.
A/N MESSAGE: so this is part two of my story, I hope you guys like it!! There will be one more part after this!!
Summery: You never liked parties. But of course your girlfriend begged you to come to one with her and you agreed. That was the biggest mistake of your life.
"Hey Y/n? So I know you don't like parties but I was wondering if you maybe wanted to go to one that's tonight? We only have to stay for as long as you want and I'll stay with you the whole time. I promise." Regina looks at you and you sigh. "You know what? Sure, I need to get out of my comfort zone a little bit anyways." You look up at her ceiling. "Wait really? Okay! Thank you so much baby!" Regina hugs your waist tight and you giggle. "What time is it anyway?" You ask the girl hugging you. "Likee 5 I think? Pretty early for a party but yeah." You look at your clock and see that it's 3:48. "Well I guess we should go ahead and get ready huh?" Regina nods and you both get off of her giant bed. "Well you can't be wearing that" Regina says as she points at your striped shirt and baggy jeans with converse. "What's wrong with this? It seems fine to me?" You say defensively. "No no no, I'll find you something in my closet." Regina turns to her closet and settles on a Lacy lavender dress for you. Your eyes go wide as she hands you the dress. "Go change." She says and turns back to her closet to decide on what she will wear. You get in the bathroom and begin changing into Regina's most likely expensive dress. After pulling down the skirt portion of the dress, you look up into Regina's mirror. Your eyes widen and you swallow hard. You felt, Hot. The dress fit you nicely and hugged your curves perfectly. You step out of the bathroom and see Regina in a black dress with a low v-line. "Holy shit babe, you look so hot" Regina's blue eyes roam over your body and you could almost melt right them and there. "Now c'mon let's do your makeup." You groans but do as she says. After a whole bunch of lipgloss and mascara, you look in the mirror and Regina stands behind you looking in the mirror as well. She kisses your cheek and hands you some heels. After you put those on, you stand up and see you are (almost) the same height as Regina. "Alright you all ready to go baby?" Regina's eyes are still looking you up and down and biting her bottom lip. You nod and she takes your hand and leads you to the door. Once you both arrive to the party, you already get a bad feeling in your stomach. But by seeing your girlfriend's big smile, you shake it off and walk with her to the entrance. She holds you by the waist the entire time you are at the party. Everywhere she goes, you go. You heard many people whispering and laughing, still not believing a loser like you was dating the queen bee like Regina. You felt like a little leech to her. That you were some sort of dog that followed her around everywhere. Regina noticed your changed attitude and you both went up to one of the rooms in the house. "Y/n baby, are you okay? Tell me pretty girl. What's wrong?" Regina sits you on the bed and caresses your face. You sigh and look up at her. "I just feel like I'm being clingy towards you. Like I'm disrupting you Gina." You feel your eyes tearing up and smudging your mascara. "Y/n! Don't you ever think that Honey! You aren't being clingy I promise." Regina leans in to kiss you and you happily lean in as well. As you both are kissing, you hear a door slam open and you pull away quickly. You see Cady at the door looking annoyed. "Regina, Gretchen is all over Jason again and I told her to leave him but she wont!" Regina sighs and stands up. "Baby do you want to come with me?" You shake your head no, leaving her alone for a little bit. She kisses your cheek and walks with Cady to see whatever Gretchen was doing. You sit on the bed and stare at your hands. That is until you hear the door open rather aggressively. "He there baby girl." You hear one of the jocks walking your way. You get up from the bed with alarm taking over your face. "Get away from me." You say but then you see 3 more jocks walking in with smirks on their faces and a whole bottle of alcohol. They all start towering over you and touch your face. One of them holds your hands and feet and you feel yourself start fo tear up. "It's okay sweetheart, I just want some of you, that's all."
#regina x reader#regina george#regina george x reader#renee rapp#renee rapp x reader#mean girls 2024
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there is NOT ENOUGH karen shetty x gretchen wieners on here, and every other platform (ao3). so here's my overdue contribution to the gay best friends to lovers of the 2024 plastics
only headcanons for now until i can write oneshots about them. (give prompts pls?)
# SFW | cutesy hcs
pre-dating! karen shetty x gretchen wieners
— karen always hangs at gretch's house after school
— sometimes it's just gretch having a full-blown rant session about guys and girls (mostly girls now)
— because gretchen wieners is bi! and starts to focus on girls more now that she dumped jacob
— also... gretchen probably has religious guilt
— and sometimes it's karen forcing gretch to do a tiktok with her
— gretch especially loves learning tiktok dances from karen
— they discovered that setting the a/c on the lowest temperature and cuddling is the best way to end a sleepover
— gretchen uses karen's arm as a pillow
— gretchen gets cold easily... so you know, back cuddles
— gretchen definitely likes karen's back cuddles
— but she likes it more when she's facing karen
— whenever gretch faces her, she overthinks whether to tell karen she's pretty because it might not be appropriate for the situation
— so karen initiates the praises instead; ranging from "you looked good with your shoes today" to "i like how you look at me"
— karen's voice slightly lowers when she's sleepy
— gretch accidentally calls karen "mamí" instead of "mamá" more than a few times
— and gretch plays it cool every time because karen doesn't seem to have heard nor realized it
— but karen DOES. EVERY TIME.
— one time it happened, they were with the whole friend group (regina, cady, janis, damian, aaron) and karen acted like she was busy on her phone to save gretchen the embarrassment
— the group still noticed though, the slip up and the acting; regina wasn't as surprised honestly
— ever since then they had been plotting to get them to realize their feelings for each other; regina and cady agreed to play their secret wingwomen, led by damian (regina gave up after the first few weeks because the two were just too hopeless)
— karen and gretchen don't realize their feelings until college
— speaking of college, they're roommates! (along with cady but girl's always at regina's place)
— still not dating at this point though, just having very normal homoerotic crises about their best friend
— it was driving gretchen absolutely maddd
— didn't help that karen was popular with the crowd
— as a result of overthinking, gretchen ended up ignoring karen; karen took a while to notice though
— by the time she did, gretch has curled up in her bed, all swollen up from crying all weekend
— karen had pink flowers to give gretchen that night
— karen dried gretchen's eyes first before confessing (my karen shetty gentlewoman, gentle giant agenda)
— karen only kissed her hand, knowing that gretchen was at a place where she needs to take it slow or else she'll get overwhelmed with things again
— that night, gretchen slept on karen's chest
— the gang arrived the next day to spot them cuddling, and took pictures for future purposes
well, that was longer than what i initially had in mind BUT IT HAD TO BE SAID.
i NEED more of them please im begging
#karen shetty#gretchen wieners#karen x gretchen#i said it#like cmon now#ALSO HAVE YOU SEEN HOW AVANTIKA LOOKS AT BEBE#mean girls#lesbian#bisexual#pansexual#wlw#sapphics#lgbtq#avantika#bebe wood#fetchen#gretchen x karen#mean girls 2024
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The three versions of the Mean Girls women seeing one anothers' heights
~~~~~~~~
Movie!Cady, the one with average height: *looking down* Uhhhh....
Bway!Cady: Hi :D
MM!Cady: At least one of is somehow tall.
Bway!Cady: I'm completely fine with my height. Makes hugs warmer.
Movie!Cady: I did not expect to see myself this short.
~~~~~~
Movie!Janis, short: What the-
MM!Janis, the shortest Janis: Why the fuck are you so tall?
Bway!Janis: Nah, you're just short.
MM!Janis: 😒
Movie!Janis: *about bway Janis* I'd kill for that wardrobe though...
~~~~~~
Movie!Gretchen, the shortest Gretchen: I-
Bway!Gretchen, kinda tall: ...Okay-
MM!Gretchen, the tallest: What's it like being short?
~~~~~~
Bway!Karen, the tallest Karen: Omg hiiii :D
MM!Karen, the second tallest: Hi! :D
Movie!Karen, the shortest Karen:
Movie!Karen: :(
MM!Karen: Wow you're so pretty! :D
Bway!Karen: Yeah! :D
Movie!Karen: :)
~~~~~~
Movie!Regina, the shortest Regina:
Movie!Regina: Why the hell are you two giants?
Bway!Regina, second tallest: Bitch cry about it.
Bway!Regina: Better question is why she *points at MM!Regina* is tall as shit.
MM!Regina, the tallest Regina: I am an inch taller than you, you shit.
#mean girls#mean girls 2024#mean girls broadway#mean girls 2004#regina george#janis sarkisian#janis ian#janis imi'ike#cady heron#gretchen wieners#karen smith#karen shetty
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3.14
<<First | <Previous | Next>
Chapter Directory
[ID:
An eight paneled comic page in grey scale. The first panel shows a turtle in a tank, looking up as tweezers drop a meal worm into its tank. A speech bubble from Gretchen says, "Morning Eric."
The second panel shows a different turtle tank, this one with two turtles in it, one standing and one only peaking its head out of its shell. There is a meal worm on the ground and the tweezers are dropping another one. Gretchen says, "Hi ladies."
The third panel shows another tank, this one with an eastern long necked turtle stretching its neck out towards a meal worm. Gretchen says, "Emmet."
The fourth panel shows Gretchen leaning down over a tank, her hand inside dropping a meal worm inside. A very small turtle, which has a head slightly smaller than the full meal worm's size, sits on a rock inside. Gretchen says, "Don't eat it in one bite."
The fifth panel shows Gretchen walking past two tanks. She looks into one, which has a turtle crawling into its water, and says, "How is your water?"
The sixth panel shows Gretchen peering into yet another tank. This one has a turtle digging into the dirt inside. Gretchen says, "Carol, you slut, are you digging a nest?"
The seventh panel has no border, and shows Gretchen standing outside next to a giant tortoise, resting her hand on its shell. The tortoise is eating a watermelon and a large piece of broccoli.
The eighth panel shows Gretchen walking through her house, holding her giant tub of meal worms. There are pictures framed on the wall, but their photos are not visible. End ID]
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Summer from Mountain Glen backstory would also fit with Salem's recruitment pattern. Hazel -> Gretchen. Watts -> Penny project chosen. Cinder -> Glass Unicorn. A concrete reason for dissatisfaction with the system, albeit some (Watts) pettier than others. Mountain Glenn which were buried and commute blocked off. Yeah that would definitely qualify.
Small thing - apparently from Grimm Eclipse there's one voice line from Yang that amounts to "It must have been nice here once" - though I can't find the source of that quote. Which if Summer was from Mountain Glenn holds a completely different impact as a statement from a survivor's daughter decades later.
as the resident Watts Defender i feel obliged to trot out watts was from mantle again, ’cause i think greenlighting the penny project was more the thousandth cut in a death-by-a-thousand cuts situation; esp. because i don’t think being pissed about the penny project is all that petty, given the context of ironwood challenging this team to come up with “the next breakthrough in defense technology” and then picked the proposal for [checks notes] a costly prototype robotic child super-soldier that requires the partial surgical removal of someone’s literal soul to function and can therefore never be built more than once, let alone manufactured at scale. like imagine being watts.
ironwood: we need to innovate to remove men from the dangers of the battlefield, so i want all of you to come up with a proposal for the next big breakthrough in defense technology.
watts probably: okay well, our combat AI is still too rudimentary to let the synthetic soldiers fight unsupervised, so i’ve designed a heavily-armored walking tank that can run faster than a car and jump dozens of feet into the air in order to keep our living officers safe on the front lines while dramatically improving our offensive capabilities against hordes of grimm.
pietro: i think we should carve out a piece of my soul and put it in a robot to create one (1) nigh-indestructible synthetic super-soldier who we’ll design to look like an atlas academy student.
ironwood: i pick the robot girl :)
like are you joking.
we don’t know for certain that the paladins were watts’ proposal but that does seem to be the implication and like—if that’s so then ironwood held on to that proposal for years after watts faked his death and eventually put ’em into production as the penny project neared completion, which… tracks with “you just stood atop it and called yourself a giant.” in the face of such egregious favoritism and interest in technological spectacle and novelty over practical solutions i’d probably quit in disgust too!
/tangent
but yeah summer being a mountain glenn survivor is intriguing enough that i’m a little regretful i didn’t think of it before nailing down her backstory for time does this adlscfj—although not enough to scrap my plans for it lmfao—it puts a real face on this historical tragedy that has been kind of looming silently over the story. and the face is the character who’s haunting the narrative from her secret place as salem’s general. very juicy.
oobleck looks at mountain glenn and sees lives that could have been saved—why weren’t they? what motivated the inaction, the choice to cut mountain glenn off, leave people to fend for themselves in the undercity? what kept people there, living in caverns with grimm nesting over their heads, rather than evacuate to vale? (your so-called free world.)
if that was summer’s childhood and she escaped and got taken in by the huntsmen academy system, raised in these values, how might she feel about vale? about beacon? about herself as a huntress? how sharply might she feel the dissonance between what huntsmen are supposed to be and the sacrifice of mountain glenn? is that what drove her to confront salem, a determination to not be complicit through her inaction? is that why she chose to stay? etc.
it also adds some really interesting potential layers to summer holding beacon and presumably participating in the razing of vale. like is this something she has enough moral qualms about to give her pause or is it an act of long-delayed retribution to her. juicy!
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only day I can say this so here:
AHEM
WHY does Caesar get to stomp around like a giant while the rest of us try not to get smushed under his big FEET?!!!!!! What’s so great about CAESAR, huh?! BRUTUS is just as cute as Caesar!!! Brutus is just as SMART as Caesar, people totally like BRUTYS just as much as they like CAESAR, and when did it become okay for one person to be the BOSS of EVERYBODY, huh?! BECAUSE THAT’S NOT WHAT ROME IS ABOUT! WE SHOULD TOTALLY JUST STAB CAESAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-Gretchen Wieners (happy ides of march.)
x
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People were so distracted by the giant tub of meal worms that they didn't even notice that gretchen just leaves her catmint out in the open
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Wizard School Mysteries: Book 2 Side Characters
Ok, the supporting cast expanded a lot in this book because of the tournament arc, but let's see if I can account for them all.
Actually, shit, first I have to go with two I forgot to add to the last batch, and pretty important ones at that. Zebul Blaa, the Dökkálfar/Dark Elf extra who ends up being part of the villainous plot in the first book. Dark elves in Norse mythology were born from the maggots that ate the giant Ymir's body, so in Midgaheim they're basically fly-people. Zebul himself is still in his maggot/larval stage of his life cycle at the start of the series, but as this concept art shows, that will change. He's got more to do in the overall story yet, so keep an eye out for him.
Laurel Creusa, meanwhile, is the student whose disappearance sets James on his whole mystery solving path. I tried to set up a red herring with her as well - James drops the word "tower" is his one conversation with her, which, given how the arcana are revealed in book 1, could have been taken as a hint that she was the final ally James needed to make in that book. But, alas, twas not to be - and I'm not sure if anyone fell for my ruse to this day.
Ok, back to book 2 proper. Professor Prospera Bubos and Professor Heka Tlancheb are the two teachers who are most responsible for the tournament at the center of the conflict in Tournament of Death, and it's fun because they're kind of polar opposites from the magic end of things - a professor of healing magic vs. a professor of combat magic - yet they both ultimately prove to be reasonable authority figures who protest the school turning an blind eye to how the students get hurt. Professor Bubos is loosely based on an alchemist character I drew ages back - mainly the big, pointy shoulders with prominent stitches. Meanwile Heka is just me being horny on main making fun of my own fondness for terrifying witch women.
We also get to see Professor Kobut Nyftek, who I think was mentioned in book 1 but not actually seen. They're one of the nicer teachers in the school, and costume-wise I took a lot of inspiration from Dr. Maruki's supervillain get up in Persona 5 Royal. There is... so much Persona in Wizard School Mysteries's DNA, way more than there is Harry Potter, and yet I know Harry Potter is the only thing it'll ever be compared to. A tragedy.
Simeon Helmschmied isn't a terribly complicated teacher concept - I just wanted to make him look like a badass, grizzled wizard blacksmith. D&D really popularized the idea of wizards not being armored and, like, I get it for mechanical reasons, but also I think some wizards deserve to also be heavily armored tanks.
Lacey Spidergrin is part of my ongoing attempt to sexualize Slenderman, and I think it's working gang.
As I said in the last post, before I enacted the grand plan to create a vast reserve of Spare Wizard Students, I plotted out a few supporting cast students based on alternate names for the Major Tarot Arcana. Godfrey Lionhardt and Columbina Paggliacci are based on alt names for The Magician - the Magus and the Juggler respectively - and loosely embody the traits of that card in turn, with flavorings based on the alt names they're given. A Magus is a more respected, princely equivalent of a magician - "Gift of the Magi" and all that - so Godfrey has a princely look about him. His last name, Lionhardt, marks him as being part of one of the noble houses in his home country of Bretonce, so he may well actually be a prince for all you know. Meanwhile, Columbina obviously takes the clown associations with "The Juggler" and plays them up to the hilt - which also allowed me to emphasize the fact that clowns are a monster species in my setting rather than just a job strange weirdos take.
I've mentioned how Joan Tatou is basically a collection of traits that Margot and Gretchen lost in the prewriting stages of the series, so I won't go heavily into that here. She's the Papesse, i.e. the High Priestess if she was more imperious and French. Wiglaf and Wagner, meanwhile, represent The Road and The Victory, which are alternate names for the Chariot - and also words that are used in a lot of descriptions of the Chariot, which makes them both feel like incomplete versions of it. That is to say, if you substitute The Road or The Victory for The Chariot in your Tarot deck, you're kind of specifically simplifying the meaning of the card. Which is why Wiglaf and Wagner are, like, just Margot's soccer hooligan fans - an extension of the Chariot, if you will.
Tinnea Lunae's prompt was "vampire who's primary animal form is a moth instead of a bat." She's trans, too, even if it hasn't come up yet. She, Titania, Sadie, and (eventually) Zebul work on the school's Newsparchment, What's the Buzz?
Grammy Crumblebuttons played a valuable role as a red herring in book 2, but her part in the narrative isn't over yet. Demented old women are too fun to write.
The Great Nyaa and Ursula Cobb are both animal-themed gag characters, but I like to think they're pretty distinct outside of that. Not that we'll know very much about the Great Nyaa given, you know, what happens in book 2.
Ok I think we can actually get to the contestants in the tournament now. Aldonza Dulcinea's outfit is specifically based on the movie outfits for Professor Umbridge. Her earlier designs were less good more generic wizard outfits, but by this point the "Let's spite the Terf Queen" streak in me was strong, and I thought it'd be fun to have a plus size character who's into pink and "girly" stuff not only be a hero, but an explicitly kind and beloved one.
I think my original concept for Breowyn was "what if a studio head forced me to tone down Margot's character concept to be more easily marketable." She's a warrior girl but, like, in the "kind of a tomboy" way that's socially acceptable instead of being a giant with a fucked up arm who looms over everybody. Ironically, I ended up really liking her design - I guess even a watered down Margot is still a fun character for me to work with.
Waldorf Brimli is, like, a wizard in the vein of the evil cult leaders in H.P. Lovecraft's stuff, and a student in the vein of those specific kind of nerds/geeks who are deeply misanthropic and antisocial under the excuse that they assume everyone hates them so they might as well hate everyone back. So, like, the kind of person who'd update the Chris Chan wiki, basically.
Gyrion Clodson is part of the "LOTR Gang," a subgroup of the Spare Wizard Students comprised entirely of Midgaheim versions of various sapient races from LOTR. Gyrion is our dwarf, though in Midgaheim dwarves are synonymized with gnomes.
My goal with Serena, beyond simply homaging magical girl tropes, was to have her be a "badass" character who's explicitly feminine - all her kickass offensive spells use pretty shiny crystals, she loves pink so much that her hair turned that color, she's very much a girly girl. So when I picked her opponents in the tournament, I wanted them to be various shades of masculine to contrast her, with three of them specifically underestimating her because of her feminine traits.
Margot's opponents (Shere Statchell included but not pictured here since she's in the previous post) are meant to play on different traits she has - Shere is has a physical disability (even worse than Margot's, since she fully lost her arm), Chungo and Eruz are both inhumanly large and somewhat ostracized for the danger people fear they present, and Sarkani is a wizard whose powers are distinctly ominous, even if she revels in that rather than trying to hide and restraint it like Margot. Sarkani also has an explicit dragon motif to go with Margot's more subtle one.
Next: alternate outfits!
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Nanscough: A Gothic Scarlet Hollow AU
Nanscough (Cornish: Scarlet Valley) is a village and civil parish in Cornwall. The local tin mine, owned by the prominent Cough (pronounced ko) family, was once prosperous and drew many to the area. A few Afro-Caribbean families even settled in Nanscough a century ago and are now assimilated into local life. But the tin trade began to decline earlier in the century following a collapse in Nanscough Mines, and the town’s fortunes fell along with it. The parish is also home to the Seven Maids, local megaliths said to be a group of girls turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath. Lately the area has been plagued by reports of creatures from Cornish lore – giants, pixies, Tommyknockers, phantom cats, and even the Devil’s Dandy Dogs. Nanscough will not give up its secrets easily….
Mr./Miss/Mx. MC Cough: MC grew up in genteel poverty with their mother, the late Vivian Cough, who fled her ancestral home under mysterious circumstances. They are visiting Nanscough for the first time in their life to attend the funeral of their aunt, Mrs. Anne Cough.
Miss Tabitha Cough: Iron-fisted manager of Nanscough Mines and mistress of Nanscough Hall. Cousin to MC.
Dustin: A badger living in a dresser in the Hall. Son to Dustin Mam. Speaks broken English with a strong Cornish accent.
Dustin Mam: Another badger living in a dresser in the Hall. Mother of Dustin. Also speaks broken English with a strong Cornish accent.
Frou-Frou: Nanscough Hall cat. Speaks with a French accent.
Miss Stella Trelawney: Former lady’s companion to Miss Cough, current lady reporter investigating stories of the Devil’s Dandy Dogs. Owner of Gretchen. Friend to Cora and Rhys.
Gretchen: Stella’s lapdog. Speaks the Queen’s English.
Miss Cora Forsyth: Afro-Caribbean shopkeeper, aspiring naturalist, and lover of Gothic tales and penny dreadfuls. Friend to Stella and Rhys. Sister of Miles and daughter of Sybil.
Mrs. Sybil Forsyth: Town midwife, herbalist, and shop owner. Mother to Cora and Miles. A fixture of Nanscough.
Master Miles Forsyth: Indifferent Afro-Caribbean youth. Lover of boy’s adventure tales and little else. Son of Sybil and brother of Cora.
Mx. Avery Bell: Afro-Caribbean barkeep at the Bell, Nanscough’s only public house. Nibling to Winifred. Liked by all, but close to no one.
Mrs. Winifred Bell: Widowed Afro-Caribbean landlady of the Bell. Aunt to Avery. Makes the best pasties. Another town fixture.
Mr. “Duke” Calloway: Local farmer. Claims to be descended from British royalty, hence the nickname. Father to Beau. Distant cousin to Julius.
Mr. Beau Calloway: Local farmer. Large adult son to Duke. Distant cousin to Julius.
Mr. Julius Tremaine: Local farmer. Scoffs at his family’s claim to royal blood. Distant cousin to Duke and Beau.
The Miners: Come from all over Cornwall and even parts beyond.
Mr. Oscar Gutierrez: British-born Spaniard schoolmaster. Father to Rosalina.
Miss Rosalina Gutierrez: British-born Spaniard girl. Daughter to Oscar. Friend to Alexis, Miles, Rebecca, and Zane.
Morsel: The Gutierrez’s cat. Speaks broken English.
Sheriff Hammet: Affable town sheriff. Suitor of the Widow Bell.
Deputy Teague: Overly-serious sheriff’s deputy. Owner of the Lord Mayor.
Deputy Penrose: Calm sheriff’s deputy. Takes ninepins far too seriously.
Jimmy: Deputy Teague’s dog. Affectionately known as the Lord Mayor. Speaks with a slight accent.
Scraps and Daisy: Local dogs and leaders of the Dog Militia. Speak with accents.
Vicar Daniel: Local vicar with sparsely attended sermons. Strange and off-putting. Husband to Mrs. Jane, father to Flora.
Mrs. Jane: Vicar Daniel’s wife, mother of Flora, keeper of sheep. Forces weekly social calls on Tabitha.
Miss Flora: Daughter of Vicar Daniel and Mrs. Jane. Claims to have befriended pixies at the Seven Maids.
Dr. Joan Kelly: One of Britain’s first female licensed doctors. Formerly of London by way of Ireland. Claims to be the widow of a sea captain who died during a transatlantic voyage. Mother to Rhys.
Mr. Rhys Kelly: “Consumptive” artist. Bought to Cornwall by his doctor mother to “recover his strength” in country air. Extremely Byronic. Son to Dr. Kelly. Friend to Stella and Cora.
The other youths: Miss Rebecca, Miss Alexis, Master Zane. Friends to Miles and Rosalina. Probably up to no good.
Mrs. Nancy: An ill-tempered and entitled miner’s wife. Mother to Miss Rebecca.
Mr. Samuel Wayne: Nanscough Hall groundskeeper, currently neglecting his duties. Probably not the host of an inhuman consciousness.
#Scarlet Hollow#Alternate Universe#Scarlet Hollow Characters#I skipped some of the animals and all of the dead people#Let me know if I missed anybody important#Gothic AU#Victorian AU
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Still listening to 1632, and honestly I forgot how much I like its narrative choices.
Okay, we have the climactic battle scene where the giant marauding mercenary army of pikemen and arquebusiers menaces the brave little 2000s era West Virginia town, right? With the substantial benefit of an M60 machine gun someone smuggled home from Vietnam and buried out in the back of his property. ("look, I'm not like a survivalist weirdo or anything. It seemed like a prank more than anything else at the time!") That did happen sometimes, but that sure was a lucky stroke, yeah? And of course our ragged band of hillbilly heroes, armed with their deer rifles, slaughter the shit out of the giant experienced army of seasoned veterans. Sure. Everybody cheer: remember, this is the army we first encounter raping and killing the shit out of civilians for maximal earnings. The ranks of men begin to fall like a glacier cleaving flesh rather than ice: what an image. Everyone sit back and bask in American technological superiority. USA! USA!
Except.... er, we just took the time to humanize one of the soldiers in that army a couple of scenes ago. He's just joined up to protect his family. His big sister's a camp follower; their family got attacked a year or two ago, and she's pretty, so she got picked as the kept woman in their band. He's just gotten old and big enough to be useful as a soldier, so he's been taken on as a recruit, and he's drinking the crap out of anything he can keep down so he can always be mysteriously too drunk to participate in the looting.
He's pretty sure he's in hell. And then he marches off into that scene of technological carnage.
So this does a bunch of things. One: it's real hard to surrender into treating that slaughter as a total victory when you know that Hans is out in it. We like Hans. He's doing his best and we really hope he lives, okay? (Spoiler: he does live.) Two: it forces you to think about everyone involved--we get a lot of POV from his sister Gretchen next--is experiencing and perceiving these American loons from a specific context that exists beyond them.
There has also just been an absolutely delightful scene where a couple of 2000s-era American doctors are proposing a joint practice with a local Sephardic doctor and he casually suggests they check over everything in Avicenna before they prescribe that in case it works. He's mildly startled when they gape at him like a fish and essaying "uh, you can read Arabic, right?" and when it becomes clear that the answer is definitely no, adds "oh, well, you're in luck, I have a Greek translation!" One of the Americans asks, very cautiously, how many languages he speaks, and he rattles off nine that he's fluent in, another four he's proficient in at least enough to read, and a fifth he's currently picking up for political reasons.
At which point the high school history teacher wanders into the room and asks what's going on, to be told by the Sephardic man's daughter "ah, it turns out my father is a more accomplished linguist even if he doesn't know some things":
"Well, of course!" Melissa snorted. "Americans are ignorant louts when it comes to language." The schoolteacher planted her arms akimbo and gave Nichols and Adams the same glare which had cowed thousands of students over the years. "What?" she demanded. "Did you think you were actually smarter than these people?"
God I love Melissa.
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Saw that you like Madoka and I was wondering, who are your favorite Witches or Uwasa? If you do have some then what about them makes them special in your eyes? Thanks in advance!
Honestly, I'm all about the Doppels! Witches are awesome too (considering that Doppels are their immature form lol), but I really love the concept of Doppels, how they relate to their magical girl and what they reveal about her, how they're used as a life-lengthening feature, etc.
My favorite Doppels are:
La Pucelle de Blancheur (Tart's Doppel):
My favorite Doppel. I just love how beautiful and elegant it is, and how it reflects Tart's pure heart but with a dark twist (as it's so pure that it basically causes people to go insane and confess their sins ceaselessly).
Ein Rotor Drache (Elisa Celjska's Doppel)
I don't really have much to say about this one except that I really love dragons, lol.
Totentanz (Mitama Yakumo's Doppel)
Another top-tier Doppel design, belonging to one of my favorite magical girls nonetheless! I absolutely love how elegant and fancy this Doppel is, yet still vaguely sinister. Its name, which means "Dance of Death," also calls back to Mitama's destructive wish (as to its abilities).
Campanella (Yachiyo Nanami's Doppel)
Another Doppel with a very cool design that displays the body horror aspect of Doppels very well. As its description explains, older magical girls like Yachiyo experience a more limited range of emotions, which causes their Doppels to fuse more with their bodies.
Kriemhild Gretchen (Madoka Kaname's Doppel)
This one gets extra points for being based on an old InuCurry design from the PSP game (Mami, Kyoko, and Homura's Doppels are the same). I love how regal and imposing this giant Soul Gem is, especially since it takes out a chunk of Madoka's chest when it's manifested. Definitely a much more interesting iteration of Kriemhild Gretchen than the mass of shadow we saw in the anime!
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Transcript Episode 90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are'. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.
[Music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about plotting vowels. But first, we have a fun, new activity that lets you discover what episode of Lingthusiasm you are. Our new quiz will recommend an episode for you based on a series of questions.
Gretchen: This is like a personality quiz. If you’ve always wondered which episode of Lingthusiasm matches your personality the most, or if you are wondering where to start with the back catalogue and aren’t sure which episode to start with, if you’re trying to share Lingthusiasm with a friend or decide which episode to re-listen to, the quiz can help you with this.
Lauren: This quiz is definitely more whimsical than scientific and, unlike our listener survey, is absolutely not intended to be used for research purposes.
Gretchen: Not intended to be used for research purposes. Definitely intended to be used for amusement purposes. Available as a link in the show notes. Please tell us what results you get! We’re very curious to see if there’re some episodes that turn out to be super popular because of this.
Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was a chat with Dr. Bethany Gardner, who built the vowel plots that we discuss in this episode.
Gretchen: This is a behind-the-scenes episode where we talked with Bethany about how they made the vowel charts that we’ve discussed, how you could make them yourself if you’re interested in it, or if you just wanna follow along in a making-of-process style, you can listen to us talk with them.
Lauren: For that, you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
Gretchen: As well as so many more bonus episodes that let us help keep making the show for you.
[Music]
Gretchen: Lauren, we’ve talked about vowels before on Lingthusiasm. At the time, we said that your vocal tract is basically like a giant meat clarinet.
Lauren: Yeah, because the reeds are like the vibration of your vocal cords – and then you can manipulate that sound in that clarinets can play different notes and voices can make many different speech sounds. They’re both long and tubular.
Gretchen: We had some people write in that said, “We appreciate the meat clarinet – the cursed meat clarinet – but we think the vocal tract is a little bit more like a meat oboe or a meat bassoon because both of these instruments have two reeds, and we have two vocal cords. So, you want to use something that has a double vocal cord.”
Lauren: I admit I maybe got the oboe and the bassoon confused. I thought that the oboe was a giant instrument. Turns out, the oboe is about the size of a clarinet. Turns out, I don’t know a lot about woodwind instruments.
Gretchen: I think that one of the reasons we did pick a clarinet at the time is because we thought, even if it’s not exactly the same, probably more people have encountered a clarinet and have a vague sense of what it looks like than an oboe, which you didn’t really know what it was. I had to look up how a bassoon works. We thought this metaphor might be a little bit clearer.
Lauren: Yes.
Gretchen: However.
Lauren: Okay, there’s an update.
Gretchen: I have now been doing some further research on both the vocal tract and musical instruments, and I’m very pleased to report that we, in fact, have an update. Your vocal tract is not just a meat clarinet, not just a meat bassoon, it is, in fact, most similar to a meat bagpipe.
Lauren: Oh, Gretchen, you found something more disgusting. Thank you?
Gretchen: I’m sorry. It’s even worse.
Lauren: Right. I guess the big bag – a bagpipe is made of a bag and pipes – the bag acts like your lungs. The lungs send air up through your vocal folds as they vibrate to make the sound. You do have a bag of air, just like in the human speech apparatus.
Gretchen: That’s a good start. What I didn’t know until I was doing some research about bagpipes – because the lengths that I will go to for this podcast have no bound – is that a bagpipe actually has reeds inside several of the pipes that extrude from the bag.
Lauren: Because there’s multiple sticking out in different spots.
Gretchen: There’s the one that you blow into, which doesn’t have a reed, but then the other ones, there’s the one with the little holes on it that you twiddle your fingers on and make the different notes, and then there’s also some other pipes up at the top. They also have reeds in them. Those reeds are just tuned from the length to a specific level. You know when you hear someone start playing the bagpipes and there’s this drone? [Imitates bagpipe sound] The sort of single note? That’s because of the note those reeds are tuned to in the other pipes that don’t have the holes in them.
Lauren: Ah, they’re not just decorative.
Gretchen: Right. They have this function of giving this harmony to the melody that’s being played on the little pipe with the holes in it, which is technically known as the “chanter,” but this is not a bagpipe podcast despite appearances to the contrary. We will link to some people on YouTube telling you more than you ever wanted to know about how bagpipes work if you want to go down that rabbit hole. But if you had an extra pair of hands or two, or a couple people helping you sort of reaching around your shoulders – this metaphor’s getting weirder by the minute – and you cut a bunch of little holes in the other sticking-up-the-top pipes –
Lauren: You would have less droning, and you could play multiple melodies or multiple notes at the same time. Hm.
Gretchen: At the same time. With this, you could make a bagpipe play something very close to vowels.
Lauren: Ah, cool!
Gretchen: This is so cursed.
Lauren: I mean, yes. Before we even talk about making it out of meat – it’s deeply, deeply cursed – it kind of reminds me of this instrument from the early 20th Century called the “voder.”
Gretchen: Would I pronounce that “vo-DUH” or “vo-DER”?
Lauren: With the R at the end.
Gretchen: Okay, “voder.”
Lauren: Thank you, convenient rhotic speaker here.
Gretchen: I’m glad to be of service.
Lauren: It kind of looked like something between a little stenographer’s keyboard and a piano, and with a whole bunch of finger keys and foot pedals you could manipulate it to make something that sounds like human speech.
Gretchen: Ah, wow. And this is pretty old?
Lauren: It’s from like the 1930s. There’s a little, short video snippet in one of the links in the show notes.
Gretchen: You could play these chords, and also have some consonants somehow, and end up with something that sounds like a synthetic human voice.
Lauren: Yeah. A lot of the early computer speech synthesis, as well, was actually quite good at making things that sounded like vowels. It turns out a lot of the consonant things are a little bit harder to do, but the very basic sound of vowels, as you say, you could play it with just a few bagpipes very carefully re-engineered.
Gretchen: I guess if you’re looking at instruments that can play multiple notes at the same time, we could also say that the human is like a meat piano.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: Or at least you could make vowels on a piano by doing a sufficiently complicated sequence of weird chords, like notes at the same time.
Lauren: I mean, we also have an instrument that’s known as the human voice. Humans are very good at singing. We possibly don’t have to engineer all these cursed things to get to that.
Gretchen: Okay. Let’s talk about the human voice as itself. We start with the vocal cords or folds. The tenseness or looseness of the vocal folds is what produces pitch. Then they go through the throat, which we can think of as one tube. Then they go through the mouth cavity, which we can think of as a second tube. Each of these tubes bounces around the sound in different ways to add two additional notes – one from the throat, one from the mouth – onto the sound that’s coming out, which is what makes it sound like a vowel to us.
Lauren: You can map the physics of air moving through the throat space and the mouth space as it comes out to pay attention to the differences between different sounds.
Gretchen: If you’re taking a physics diagram or a diagram of the acoustic signal and saying, “Which pitches are coming out of the mouth, which frequencies are coming out of the mouth that are being produced by these two chambers?” then you can see what those are, and you can do stuff with those diagrams once you’ve made them.
Lauren: The seeing bit is spectrograms, which we looked at in an earlier episode and played around with making different sounds and how they look in this way of visualising it where you have all these bands of strength and information that you can see vary depending on the different sounds that you made. That’s because of those different ways that we manipulate and play around with the air as its coming out of our mouth.
Gretchen: The first band that comes out is just the pitch of the voice itself. The lowest one is what we hear as the pitch of the sound, but I can make /aaaa/ and I can make /iiii/. Those are the same set of pitches but on different vowels.
Lauren: There’s something more than pitch happening there.
Gretchen: There’s something more than pitch happening. There’s two more notes – sounds – that come out at the same time. If the throat chamber is large because the tongue is fairly high and far forward, then this sound that’s the next one after the pitch, which was call “F1,” is low. Then if the mouth is quite open, and the lips are spread, the mouth chamber is quite small, so that sound is quite high, so the next sound, “F2,” is high pitched. If you put your tongue far forward, and your lips spread, you get /i/. The first of these dark bands is low; the second of them is high. That produces the sound that we hear as /i/. Whereas, by comparison, if we make the sound /u/, the throat chamber is still large because the tongue is quite high, but now, the mouth chamber is big because we have the lips rounding that make it big – /u/. Now, F1 is low, and F2 is also low, and we’re hearing the sound /u/.
Lauren: We have a very clear way of telling from those signals in the spectrogram, if we look at it, the difference between an /i/ and an /u/, even if we can’t hear it, we can see it on the spectrogram. This is where you begin to read spectrograms.
Gretchen: Or if we want to start measuring spectrograms very precisely, we can start doing this. We can also start seeing, okay, is /i/ when I make it the same as the /i/ when you make it?
Lauren: They’re similar enough that we recognise it as the same sound. If we both say, “fleece.”
Gretchen: “Fleece.”
Lauren: You say, /flis/. I say, /flis/.
Gretchen: /pətɛɪtoʊ pətatoʊ/. I think they sound pretty similar.
Lauren: Mine is maybe a little bit higher. I really pushed my tongue forward and up. It’s a very Australian thing to do.
Gretchen: We can actually record some people making all of the vowels and compare their measurements for these two different bands of frequency and see how similar two people’s vowels are to each other.
Lauren: Depending on the quality of your recording, you can see a lot more happening there as well. There’re all the properties that mean that we can tell your voice from my voice, or my voice from someone who has exactly the same accent because we have all these other features. It’s very different to if you record, say, a whistle or one of those tuning forks that people use to tune instruments because they are giving a clean single note.
Gretchen: A pure tone that’s just one frequency, one pitch, not several pitches all at the same time that we then have to smoosh together and interpret as a vowel sound.
Lauren: That’s what gives the human voice its richness. If a human voice sings the same note as a clarinet and an oboe, which are definitely two completely different woodwind instruments, there’s all these extra bits and things in the spectrogram that you can pick up the difference in the quality or just use your ears – also another possibility.
Gretchen: Yeah. If you wanna do detailed acoustic analysis on it – which is kind of fun and can tell us more precise things about the differences between how different people speak, which is neat – then you have this very precise way of measuring it by converting it into a visual graph/chart thing or a vowel plot rather than just listening to someone and being like, “Uh, these sound pretty similar. I dunno. I guess they’re a bit different. How are they different? Hmm.” Sometimes, being able to do it with numbers is easier.
Lauren: In the era before we had computers to create spectrograms and take these measurements, people did use their ear. The best phoneticians had this amazing ability to tell the difference between really, really subtly-similar-but-slightly-different sounds.
Gretchen: And they’re so well trained in being able to hear the difference between “Oh, you’re saying this, and your tongue is a little bit further forward than this other person who’s saying this with their tongue a little bit further back,” but if you’re not very good at hearing tongue position out of sounds, you can also produce some stuff and make the machines tell you some numbers about it, which can be easier with a different type of training.
Lauren: When we talk about the position of the tongue and how open the mouth is, we can use a plot to map where in the mouth these things are happening. That’s called the “vowel space.” We made a lot of silly sounds when we talked about that many episodes ago.
Gretchen: The vowel space goes from /i-ɛ-a/ on one side.
Lauren: That’s all up the front of your mouth, and it’s just going from being more close to more open.
Gretchen: /i/ to /ɛ/ to /a/, but you can through all these subtle gradations between them, and through /u-ɔ-ɑ/ at the back.
Lauren: That’s from all the way up the top at the back to open at the back.
Gretchen: You can draw a diagram of this which is shaped like square that’s been a bit skewed. It’s wider at the top than at the bottom. It’s known as the “vowel trapezoid” because the mouth is not perfectly shaped like a square. The jaw can hinge open.
Lauren: Only so far.
Gretchen: Only so far.
Lauren: Because this represents how you say or articulate these sounds, this is known as “articulatory phonetics.”
Gretchen: But then because you’re articulating a thing that goes into a sound that we can also analyse as the sound itself, these ways that you can articulate things map onto things that show up in the sound itself. Analysing that is called “acoustic phonetics.”
Lauren: Because you’re paying attention to the acoustic properties – the sound properties.
Gretchen: The really nifty thing is that this vowel chart that we’ve made from over 100 years ago, linguists, before they had computers, were like, “Here’s what I think the articulatory properties of the vowels are based on my mouth and my ear and some other people’s mouths and ears.” You can actually map very precisely this acoustic thing. Once we had computers, you can make them correspond to each other in this way that – you hope it works because, obviously, people do understand the vowels, but it actually does work when you start measuring things as well.
Lauren: I had always wondered whether it was just a coincidence that the articulation – where you put your mouth – and the acoustic information about the F1 and F2 with the spectrogram, but explaining it in terms of F1 and F2 are the way you change the shape of your throat and your mouth that leads to these changes in the acoustic signal, you can see how the articulation and the acoustics come together, and you get a similar type of information across both of them.
Gretchen: Absolutely. I think it’s really neat that there’s this relatively straightforward correspondence. There’s also, you know, an F3 that also does other stuff because there’s other more squishy bits of your mouth, and we’re not getting into them.
Lauren: There’s also a bunch of flip-flopping of X- and Y-axes that you need to do that Bethany kindly walked us through in the bonus episode.
Gretchen: Because these diagrams were created in an era before they were doing the computer acoustics. Sometimes, I think about the alternate version of what phonetics would look like if we’d started doing it with computers right away, and how there’s all this analogue stuff that’s residual based on human impressions, and how our vowel charts might be completely rotated if we had just started doing it with computers the whole time.
Lauren: But then we’d have to imagine ourselves standing on our heads to say anything, so I’m glad they are the way they are.
Gretchen: That’s true. When you’re talking about vowels, it’s an interesting challenge with English because there’s lots of different dialects of English, varieties of English, ways of speaking English, and, generally speaking, we’re pretty good at understanding other accents. One of the big factors that accents vary on, though, is the vowels.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: If you’re getting people to record a word list to do some vowel analysis on, what you might wanna do is have them record a bunch of words that all begin and end with the same consonant insofar as possible.
Lauren: Because vowels are very sweet and easily influenced. They’re very easily influenced by the consonants that are next to them. You have to make sure that they’re all kept in line and not influenced by what’s happening around them by giving them all the same context.
Gretchen: They’re very susceptible to peer pressure. You can have people say something like, “beat,” “bet,” “bit,” “bought,” “boot,” all of this stuff between B and T.
Lauren: I learnt to record between H and D: “hid,” “had,” “hoo’d,” “hawed.” Some of those words are less, uh, common – frequent – than others, but again, a really consistent environment.
Gretchen: But this also, obviously, causes problems for when you want to talk about the particular vowels in a given accent or in a given variety because if you go around saying, “Oh, well, the /hoɪd/ vowel” or something like this, how do you know if that’s a Cockney person saying, “hide,” or it’s me saying “hoyed,” or something else because all your consonants are the exact same, and there’s nothing to let you figure out what the original word is.
Lauren: Someone did come up with a solution for this. That person’s name is John Wells.
Gretchen: John Wells is this British phonetician who I’ve never actually met in person, but I feel like I know him because I used to read his blog back when he posted more actively.
Lauren: He used to write his blog in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which means that if you read the IPA, you would be reading it in John Wells’s voice.
Gretchen: You absolutely would be. This was a challenge that I used to set to myself. Sometimes, he also wrote in Standard English orthography, to be fair, but sometimes he would just write a whole blog post in IPA, and you’d be like, “Cool, I guess I’m reading this out loud to myself and hearing John Wells’s accent and speaking it like him,” which was really neat. In the 1980s, John Wells was like, “Hey, it’d be really useful if we had a way to refer to sound changes that happen in different English varieties,” which often happen to – like, all of the times you say the /ɪ/ vowel are a little bit more like this or like that, depending on the accent.
Lauren: I think it was very personally motivated because he was writing a book called “Accents in English.” It gets very difficult in a book, especially, but even in an audio recording, to be like, “the /ɪ/ vowel,” “the /u/ vowel.”
Gretchen: Right. You could use the International Phonetic Alphabet to refer to the specific vowel that people are making. But if you want to say, “People in this area realise this vowel as that, and people in this other area realise the same vowel as something else,” how do you refer to that thing that’s the macro-category of vowel that people would consider themselves to be saying the same word, but the specific way they’re realising it is different? He came up with what he called “the standard lexical sets,” which are now also called, “Wells Lexical Sets,” possibly John Wells’s greatest legacy, which is a bunch of words that are, crucially, easy to distinguish from each other based on the surrounding consonants that you can say when you’re giving a talk – like you can say, “the ‘kit’ vowel,” or “the ‘goose’ vowel,” or “the ‘fleece’ vowel,” and people know that the “kit” vowel refers to the specific sound because there’s no other “keet” word in English that it could be confused with.
Lauren: John Wells was somewhat self-deprecating when he was talking about this, and he was like, “I just kind of came up with it in a week where I had to write this bit of the book, and it’s weird to think that they’re still in use now,” but it was based on years of insight into the different ways different varieties of English realise different vowels and the balance he was trying to strike.
Gretchen: He has this charming blog post from 2010 where he’s like, “Anybody’s welcome to use them. I don’t claim any copyright. Maybe this is my legacy now, I guess.” He does actually put quite a bit of thought into the sets because they’re words that can’t be easily confused for each other. Sometimes, that means the words are a little bit rare. You have “fleece.” You might think, “Well, why not use ‘sheep’ because surely that’s more common. People say that.”
Lauren: But “ship” and “sheep” are very hard to distinguish in some varieties of English.
Gretchen: Right. If you had “sheep,” it could be confused with “ship,” whereas if you have “fleece” and “kit,” there’s no “flice” or “keet” for them to be confused with.
Lauren: Good nonce words to add to your collection.
Gretchen: Thank you. Similarly, for people like me where I make the vowels in “caught,” as in the past tense of “catch,” and “cot,” as in a small bed, the same. If I talk about /cɑt/ and /cɑt/, people are like, “I dunno which one you’re talking about because you say them both the same.” And I’m like, “Great, neither do I.”
Lauren: You mean when you’re talking about /cɑt/ and /cɔt/.
Gretchen: Hmm. Yes, see, you don’t have that “caught/cot merger.”
Lauren: Very easy for me, but it’s much easier to be able to say /θɔt/ and /lɑt/ – much more distinct for me to perceive with you because they don’t have merged equivalents.
Gretchen: “Thought” and “lot” are much more distinct because the consonants are different. You don’t need to be relying only on the vowels. Some of these words are just super fun. Can we read the whole Wells Lexical Sets? There’re not very many of them.
Lauren: Sure. Let’s take turns in going through each of the words.
Gretchen: All right.
Lauren: So, you can hear the differences in the way we pronounce each of these vowels.
Gretchen: /kit/.
Lauren: /kit/.
Gretchen: / dɹɛs/.
Lauren: / dɹɛs/.
Gretchen: / tɹæp/.
Lauren: /tɹæp/.
Gretchen: /lɑt/.
Lauren: /lɑt/.
Gretchen: /stɹʌt/.
Lauren: /stɹʌt/.
Gretchen: /fʊt/.
Lauren: /fʊt/.
Gretchen: /bæθ/.
Lauren: /bɑθ/.
Gretchen: Ooo, very different.
Lauren: We’ll come back to that one.
Gretchen: /klɑθ/.
Lauren: /klɑθ/.
Gretchen: /nɛɹs/.
Lauren: My Australian English speaker in me is already immediately prepared for /nɛːs/.
Gretchen: So, non-rhotic. Very good.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: /flis/.
Lauren: /flis/.
Gretchen: /fɛɪs/.
Lauren: /fɛɪs/.
Gretchen: /pɑm/.
Lauren: /pæm/.
Gretchen: Ooo, very different. /θɑt/.
Lauren: /θɔt/.
Gretchen: Also, very different. We’ll come back to this. /goʊt/.
Lauren: /gəut/.
Gretchen: Bit different. /gus/.
Lauren: /gus/.
Gretchen: /pɹəɪs/.
Lauren: /pɹæɪs/.
Gretchen: Bit different. I have Canadian raising there. We’ll get back to that. /t͡ʃoɪs/.
Lauren: /t͡ʃoɪs/.
Gretchen: /moʊθ/.
Lauren: /mæʊθ/.
Gretchen: Also, we’ll get back to that. /niɹ/.
Lauren: /nɪɑ/.
Gretchen: /skwɛɹ/.
Lauren: /skwɛɑ/.
Gretchen: /stɑɹt/.
Lauren: /stɑːt/.
Gretchen: /nɔɹθ/.
Lauren: /nɔːθ/.
Gretchen: /fɔɹs/.
Lauren: /fɔːs/.
Gretchen: /kjʊɹ/.
Lauren: /kjʊɑ/. I’m only slightly hamming up my Australian English diphthongs there.
Gretchen: That whole set with the Rs where I’m like, “These are just the same sounds, but now there’s an R,” you’re like, “No, these are really different diphthongs.”
Lauren: /kjʊɑ/.
Gretchen: /kjʊɑ/. /kjʊɹ/.
Lauren: Taking you on a journey of my whole mouth.
Gretchen: One thing you could do if you’re trying to compare mine and Lauren’s vowels is you could listen to us saying them and being like, “Yeah, those sound kind of different in some places.” But another thing we could do, is we could draw some diagrams.
Lauren: That���s what we did.
Gretchen: Yes!
Lauren: We were very grateful that Dr. Bethany Gardner – who is a recent PhD in psychology and language processing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville in the USA – took the time to work with us to take recordings of us saying words and plotting the vowels onto a vowel plot.
Gretchen: Now, we can look at our vowel plots and compare our vowels to each other. We have a whole bonus episode with Bethany about how we made these graphs with them. For the moment, let’s just look at them and compare them with each other and say some things about the results.
Lauren: We sent Bethany recordings of us reading the Wells Lexical Sets, much the way we did just then.
Gretchen: Less giggling though.
Lauren: We did record them a little bit more professionally, but they also used some processes to scrape data of equivalent word recordings from episodes of Lingthusiasm using our transcripts – turns out, another use of our transcripts!
Gretchen: Get people to analyse your vowels for you. It’s so cool!
Lauren: You can see the difference between clearly spoken vowels where we’re really focusing on them and then that really compelling influence that other sounds have on vowels that drag them all over the space.
Gretchen: Yeah. I’m looking at the first set of graphs for each of us, which are the Wells Lexical Sets, and my vowels are a lot more consistent in them. When I make /i/ and /ɪ/ and /u/, all the points are quite clustered in one spot – because we said everything several times – but I seem to be hitting quite a consistent target there. Whereas when I look at Bethany’s vowel plot of me from the Lingthusiasm episodes, there’s way more stuff there, and I’m way more spread out. My vowels are less consistent with each other because I’m producing them in several words. They tested several different words. I’m just producing them in running speech where things merge into each other a lot more rather than this very clear word list style.
Lauren: And human ears and brains are so good at disambiguating things that might be very close to each other in the plot, but in a running sentence, we can hear them quite clearly for the words that they are.
Gretchen: Right. My “goose” vowel and my “foot” vowel – /gus/ and /fʊt/ – are almost totally distinct from each other when I’m reading a word list. There’s very little overlap in terms of how I’m saying them. But when I’m saying them in running speech, apparently there’s a lot of overlap because I’m probably saying something like, “Oh, go get the goose,” /gʊs/, rather than /gus/ with that really clear /u/.
Lauren: There’s no other word I’m gonna confuse “goose” with, or even if I did, in context, I’d know what thing you’re expecting me to go get.
Gretchen: Right. Even if I’m saying something like, “dude,” you’re not gonna confuse that for “dud.” I’d be saying them in different contexts.
Lauren: The nice thing is you can see, especially from our clearly spoken word lists, that we are speaking a language where the vowels are in a similar place, but there are some slight differences. You can actually start to get the hang of the differences in the way different varieties of English tend to use the vowel space from this information.
Gretchen: One of the things I noticed about your vowel plot, Lauren – and this is a feature of Australian English – is that your “kit” vowel and your “fleece” vowel are very close to each other, especially in episode speech rather than word list speech.
Lauren: Yeah, “kit” and “fleece,” for me, are both really far forward. You’re using other features like length or tenseness to really disambiguate them. People struggle to do it.
Gretchen: Or just in context. I noticed when I was visiting Australia that people would say things like /bɪːg/, and I’d be like, “Oh, okay, I would say that as /bɪg/.”
Lauren: It’s a pretty classic feature of Australian English. It does remind me of one of the most embarrassing times someone misheard me when I was living in the UK. I was talking about how I used to be on a team with my friends for social netball. This person was not listening that well, and it was a noisy environment, and they thought that I had said, “nipple.”
Gretchen: Oh, no!
Lauren: /nɪpl̩/ and /nɛtbɑl/.
Gretchen: /nɛtbɑl/, /nɛtbɑl/, whereas I think my /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ vowels, my “kit” and “dress” vowels, are pretty distinct from each other. They don’t really overlap.
Lauren: Whereas all of Australian English is really far forward. It tends to be quite high. The British English speaker – I don’t know what sport they thought we play in Australia, but there was a moment of deep confusion.
Gretchen: These are the types of things that you can find out when you get your vowels done the way sometimes people – I think there’s a trend on Instagram right now to get your colours done, you know, find out whether you’re a “winter” or a “soft spring” or something like this.
Lauren: I’m an Australian English “kit”-fronting.
Gretchen: Yeah. What are your vowels? What does this say about where you’re from? Is there anything you noticed about mine?
Lauren: I think, for you, definitely what becomes clear is that “caught/cot merger,” or, as I like to think about it, the “Gawne/gone merger.”
Gretchen: Ah, the “Gawne/gone merger.”
Lauren: I can tell if people have it if my name and the word “gone” sound the same.
Gretchen: The past participle of “go.”
Lauren: It’s very salient for me. The cot/caught merger is so famous, people don’t use the Wells Set terms for it. They just refer to it as “caught/cot.”
Gretchen: But you could also call it the “thought/lot merger” or the “lot/thought merger.” I never know which one goes first because I literally just think of these as being said the same.
Lauren: You can see evidence. We’re not imagining that you’re merging them. You are physically merging them in the vowel space.
Gretchen: I’m literally saying them as the same thing. I was always confused about the “thought” vowel when I was learning the International Phonetic Alphabet because I was like, “I can’t figure out how to make a sound that is somewhere in between this sound in ‘lot’ and ‘thought’ but doesn’t go all the way up to the /oʊ/ in ‘goat’.” It doesn’t feel like there’s anything between them for me. That’s true. The vast majority of Canadians have “thought” and “lot” merged. But unlike at least some Americans, we don’t have them merged low; we have them merged high. I have “thought” and “caught,” and in order to produce the other vowel, I had to actually produce something lower in my throat – like /θɑt/ /cat/ which sounds very American to me – I had to produce this lower sound because there was no space between “thought” and “goat.” They’re very close to each other. In fact, the thing that I wasn’t producing was /ɑ/, the really low one, that sort of dentist sound.
Lauren: Yeah. Movements and mergers can happen in all kinds of different directions. The merging of “cot” and “caught” also explains why it took me a very long time to understand that “podcast” is a pun because it’s meant to be a pun with “broadcast,” and /pɑd/ and /bɹɔːd/.
Gretchen: /pɑdkæst/ and /bɹɑdkæst/. It’s the same vowel for me.
Lauren: Whereas it works as a pun for you. That was very satisfying to learn that’s why that’s meant to be a pun.
Gretchen: The pun that I didn’t get based on my accent – and this is to do with the “price” and “mouth” vowels – I didn’t realise that “I scream for ice cream” was supposed to be a pun.
Lauren: Oh, because the raising that you have in Canada means that it doesn’t work that way, whereas /ɑɪ skɹim fə ɑɪ skɹim/.
Gretchen: Right, you have the same vowel in those – or the same diphthong – but for me, “I scream for ice cream,” those are very different. In “choice” and “price,” I have different vowels than I would have in “choys” and “prize” – if “choys” was a word.
Lauren: “Bok choys” – multiple.
Gretchen: “Bok choys” – yeah, several of them. And “prize.”
Lauren: Returning to “podcast” but moving to the other end of the word, /kɑst // kæst/ as a distinction is so famous in mapping varieties of British English that people talk about /bɑθ // tɹæp/ distinctions all the time.
Gretchen: I hear of it as called the “bath/trap split,” but as you can hear, the “/bæθ // tɹæp/ split,” I just say them both the same.
Lauren: Whereas in Australia, Victorians traditionally would say /kæsl̩/ like “trap,” and people further north and in the rest of the country could say, /kɑsl̩/ –
Gretchen: Like “bath.”
Lauren: So, whether you’re a /kɑsl̩/ or a /kæsl̩/ shows this “bath/trap split” as well, to the point where, in New South Wales, you get the city of “New /kɑsl̩/,” but in Victoria, you have the town of “/kæsl̩/ Main.”
Gretchen: Ooo, this “castle” distinction from the “trap/bath split” – I think sometimes when I’m trying to do a fake British accent, I will just make all of my “traps” and “baths” into /tɹɑps/ and /bɑθs/.
Lauren: Right, okay. You know there’s something happening there, and you haven’t quite landed – because it does vary.
Gretchen: Well, then they’re not different categories for me because it’s all one category, and I push them all forward rather than moving half of them because I don’t know which half to move.
Lauren: I find it very satisfying listening to “No Such Thing as a Fish,” because they talk about the /pɑdkɑst/ or the /pɑdkæst/, and their guests do, depending on whether they’re from Southern England or more in the midlands and north where they tend to say /kæst/ instead of /kɑst/.
Gretchen: I have literally never noticed this distinction. I’ve also listened to many episodes of “No Such Thing as a Fish” because you made me start listening to them back in the day, and I’ve never noticed that they say anything different because it’s just not something I pay attention to.
Lauren: It’s so salient for me as a Victorian English speaker, but I notice it all the time. There would be a really fun mapping variation activity to do listening through to Fish – turns out I just listen to it and don’t get distracted by that too much.
Gretchen: Well, if you want to commission Bethany to make graphs of their vowels, I’m sure that’s an option.
Lauren: I love how Wells’ lexical set has just entered – in many ways, the “bath/trap split,” it means you get all these other terms like “goose fronting,” which is just great as a term.
Gretchen: I love how vivid these words are. Things like “fleece” and “goose” and “goat,” they’re very common animal nouns that are quite vivid.
Lauren: And there’re definitely linguists who have dressed up as Wells Lexical Set items for Halloween. It makes a great group Halloween costume.
Gretchen: Oh my gosh, my favourite one of these was from North Carolina State University. They got the whole department, and they each dressed up as one member of the Wells Lexical Set. Someone was a “kit.” They dressed like a cat. Someone dressed like a goose, and someone dressed like a cloth or a fleece. Then they stood in the positions to create the vowel diagram. They posted a photo on the internet. You can see it. We will link to it. It’s really great.
Lauren: Magic. You and I also once had a project where we plotted the Wells Lexical Set using emoji.
Gretchen: That was your project.
Lauren: I did the making the joke. You did the graphic design. It was a good team project.
Gretchen: Okay, that’s fair. That’s fair. I feel like I remember you being the instigator of this.
Lauren: Shenanigans were shenaniganed.
Gretchen: You can get a goose emoji and a goat emoji, and you can map the vowels in there as well.
Lauren: And “Goose fronting” – because we’re talking about moving the tongue further forward or back or up and down in the vowel space – I have quite fronted vowels as an Australian English speaker for my front vowels. So, “goose” – I’ve already got it quite far forward compared to you. You can see that in the diagrams.
Gretchen: I think my “goose” – my goose is also cooked – my “goose” is also fronted. Because I think Canadian English is also undergoing goose fronting. There’s a lot of different regions that are all simultaneously fronting their geese – no, not their “geese,” fronting their “gooses.”
Lauren: Fronting their “gooses.” I feel like the really stereotypical example is from California, particularly in the lexical item “dude.”
Gretchen: “Dude” – sort of like a surfer pronunciation of “duuude.”
Lauren: “/du̟d/ you’re a fronted /gu̟s/.”
Gretchen: If you compare that with like /dud/, which would be less fronted, /dud/ sounds like you’re more of a fuddy duddy, and /du̟d/ sounds like you’re “so /ku̟l/.”
Lauren: Yeah, I mean, there’re other things happening there as well because I found a paper while researching this where someone looked at 70 years of Received Pronunciation, which is that incredibly stuffy, British, old-fashioned newsreader voice. Apparently, goose fronting is happening in that variety as well.
Gretchen: Oh, so if the Queen was still alive, she’d be fronting her “goose” as well?
Lauren: Quite possibly. Gooses are being fronted all over the place.
Gretchen: All over the English-speaking world. One of the things that can happen if you’re getting your vowel tea leaves read is you can say things about region. Another thing that looking at a vowel plot can do – because vowels just contribute so much to our sense of accent – is it can say things about gender. One of the cool studies that I came across about this is there’re studies of kids. People often assess someone’s gender based on their voice. If someone’s on the phone, you may have an idea about their gender. You may also have an idea of their age. Part of this is based on vocal tract size. Kids’ voices are high pitched because kids’ heads and throats and larynxes are smaller than adults.
Lauren: The cool thing is there’s no gender difference in that until puberty. People who go through a testosterone-heavy puberty tend to grow larger vocal tracts and tend to have deeper pitches. I mean, not in the scheme of things where they’re so completely different. There’s so much overlap. But we’re really tuned into these subtle differences. But before that age, anything that kids are doing different, it’s nothing to do with what’s happening with the meat pipe and everything to do with what’s happening with the social performance of gender, which is to do with your culture.
Gretchen: Even at age 4, when there’s really no physiological difference, age 8 when there’s really no physiological difference, you can see that kids are producing their vowels somewhat differently in a difference that increases with age based on their gender because they’re culturally acquiring “This is what it means to feel like a boy,” “This is what it means to feel like a girl,” and they’re doing gender with their voices even when they don’t have the vocal tract changes reinforcing that yet.
Lauren: Cool.
Gretchen: Yeah. You can see that there are differences at age 4 that increase with age and increase up to age 8 and 12 and 16 and get more distinct from each other. The other thing is, once people get a bit older in teenage-hood and in adulthood, there are gender differences in vocal tract. The general finding with gender differences in vowel plot size – so we’ve been talking about having some vowels be more front or some vowels be more similar to each other, but the overall finding when it comes to gender is roughly that, at least in English-speaking environments, men tend to have all of their vowels more similar to each other, more towards the centre of the space/ Specifically, cis straight men tend to have vowels that are all more towards the centre of the vowel space. Everybody else – so cis, straight women, gay men, lesbians, trans people of all genders, nonbinary people – use way more of the vowel space.
Lauren: Straight men, you’re missing out.
Gretchen: Like, cis straight men are doing this one very specific thing with buying into hegemonic masculinity of vowels where they’re not wearing interesting colours, and they’re not doing interesting vowels.
Lauren: Hmm.
Gretchen: There was one quote from one of the studies that I read where they had one cis straight man who was an anomaly in the list of not doing this very centralised vowel thing, and he was like, “Yeah, sometimes people hear me, and they think I’m gay, which I’m not. I’m just a nerd. I don’t really do that macho stuff.”
Lauren: Aww, it’s nice they asked him.
Gretchen: Yeah. “People just perceive my vowels as whatever. I don’t really care. I’m not trying to do that thing with my vowels.”
Lauren: Fascinating that the social discourse was enough that he had been made aware of it.
Gretchen: Yeah, and that doing anything out of that little man box of the very small set of vowels was enough to get him thinking, “Oh, yeah, well, it’s because I don’t buy into this particularly narrow view of masculinity.”
Lauren: Fascinating. I should say, you flagged English there, but that’s because we have more of this work in English. We need more of this work across the world’s languages. There’s so much to be done about the social dimensions of vowels.
Gretchen: Right. A lot of the early work in, especially, gender and vowels has this very essentialist framework of like, “We found the male vocal tract; we found the female vocal tract.” There’s a recent study by Santiago Barreda and Michael Stuart which I got to see at the Linguistic Society of America last year where they were looking at “What are the vowel differences between genders, and can we actually characterise these more precisely?” They found that the biggest thing that affected vowel spaces was actually related to height. Taller people have more space in their vowels – deeper voices.
Lauren: Makes sense. They’ve got more space for their bigger meat pipe. That’s more of a bassoon than an oboe, Gretchen.
Gretchen: Taller people have a bigger meat pipe. In fact, the relationship between height of your whole body and size of your meat pipe is very linear and doesn’t have a categorical distinction for gender. Of course, if you collapse this into two different buckets labelled “men” and “women,” you’ll find, on average, that men are taller than women on average, but of course, there’re lots of individual people who are exceptions to that, and it’s much more of a variant thing. Similarly, with some of the research on sexuality, some of the early stuff is like, “Oh, do gay men or do lesbians have different-shaped vowel tracts from a physiological perspective?” The answer is “No, this is cultural.”
Lauren: Right, yeah.
Gretchen: But the finding keeps being reported in terms of like, “Oh, well, gay men have more extreme vowels in various places,” especially with “trap” being produced further away from the centre of the mouth. Lesbian women tend to have further-back sounds for “palm” and for “goose,” or sometimes they’re intermediate between male and female targets. But again, this seems to very much be cultural. The bi women – some studies found they patterned with the lesbian women. Some studies found they pattern with the straight women. No one knows what to do with us. The one study I found on bi men found they patterned with the gay men, but again, maybe other studies would find something different. There’s a paper by Lal Zimman about trans men’s voices being perceived as quote-unquote “gay” after they go on testosterone. He finds that it’s not quite the exact same as the cis gay men, but it’s also because it seems to not be in that narrow man box. People are just parsing it as gay.
Lauren: So many cultural attitudes coming to bear on vowel spaces.
Gretchen: Studies on trans women’s vowel spaces is often fairly dominated by the speech pathology literature, which is about, specifically, vocal training and trans women really trying to make their voices sound different, but it still finds that they’re not doing exactly the same thing as either cis women or cis men.
Lauren: Right. Again, lots of cultural practice at play there. Anything about our nonbinary pals?
Gretchen: There is a recent dissertation by Jacq Jones, and they find that basically nonbinary people do whatever the heck they like.
Lauren: I love it.
Gretchen: Which is, again, not exactly the same as anybody else and not necessarily the same as each other either. They could just keep doing whatever they want. But yeah, there’s a lot of stuff on gender and sexuality, especially in terms of dispersion of the vowel space and regional stuff in terms of specific things being closer or further from each other.
Lauren: There’s so much happening in vowels in terms of plotting them all in this space in the mouth, but also so much happening in terms of plotting them in the social space. This is what makes vowels so rich and so interesting.
Gretchen: I feel like when we’re talking about vowel plotting, there’s this aspect of “Mwahaha, I am putting my fingers together and plotting,” which is maybe the fact that vowels do convey so much social information about who you are or where you’re from that you can make plots about people when you know what their vowels are. If we were going to make a meat clarinet or a meat bassoon or even a meat bagpipe –
Lauren: Oh, dear.
Gretchen: I’m so sorry. We would not only want it to be able to convey the basic vowel chart. One of the reasons why I think these synthetic versions of the human voice often sound so weird is that they don’t have all of this additional demographic information, regional information, gender and sexuality information that’s also so important to our experience of vowels.
[Music]
Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode – including visualisations of our very own vowel plots – go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.
Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Our most recent bonus topic was a chat with Dr. Bethany Gardner, who built the vowel plots we discussed in this episode. We talked to Bethany about how to do vowel charts and how you can plot your own vowels, or you can just learn about how they did it for us. Think of it like a little behind-the-scenes episode on the making of this episode. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.
Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.
Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
#linguistics#language#lingthusiasm#podcast#transcripts#podcasts#episodes#episode 90#vowels#vowel sounds#vowel plots#vowel charts#IPA#international phonetic alphabet#phonetics#accents
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Obey me characters as Mean Girls quotes:
Lucifer:
"I'm not like a regular mum, I'm a cool mum!"
Mammon:
"Get in loser we're going shopping."
Leviathan:
"Grool. I meant to say cool but then I started to say great."
Satan:
"Why should Caesar just get to stomp around like a giant while the rest of us try not to get smushed under his big feet? Brutus is just as cute as Caesar, right? Brutus is just as smart as Caesar, people totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar, and when did it become okay for one person to be the boss of everybody because that’s not what Rome is about! We should totally just STAB CAESAR!”
Asmodeous:
"But you're, like, really pretty. So you agree? You think you're really pretty?"
Beelzebub:
"Made out with a hot dog? Oh my god that was one time!"
Belphie:
"Gretchen, stop trying to make *fetch* happen. It's not going to happen!"
Diavolo:
"I don't think my father, the inventor of Toaster Strudel, would be too pleased to hear about this."
Barbatos:
"Four for you Glen Coco! You go, Glen Coco."
Solomon:
"I’m sorry that people are so jealous of me, but I can’t help it that I’m popular."
Simeon:
"Don't have sex. Because you will get pregnant, and die. Don't have sex in the missionary position, don't have sex standing up, just...don't do it. Promise?"
Luke:
"You can't sit with us!"
Sadly "your hair looks sexy pushed back" & "I want my pink shirt back" & "she doesn't even go here" & "can I get you anything, some snacks? Condoms?" Didn't make it. 😭
#sorry i just watched mean girls#obey me!#obey me#obey me shall we date#obey me mc#obey me fandom#om! mc#om! shall we date#obey me shitpost#obey me lucifer#mean girls#obey me mammon#obey me leviathan#obey me satan#obey me asmo#obey me beelzebub#obey me belphie#obey me diavolo#obey me barbatos#obey me solomon#obey me simeon#obey me luke#obey me simp#obey me crack#saadie's crack 🌻
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fight, fight, fight , zack macewen
note, this was inspired after reading some post about how syd was nervous after watching marty fight chara. i get inspo from the weirdest things, but i had to look up who fought him in the past and i went with zack so yay! this is dedicated to @iwantahockeyhimbo cause we are both zack lovers.
pair, zack macewen x reader
summary, zack macewen, 6'3, gets into a fight with 6'9 giant, zdeno chara.
warnings, fighting,
word count, 744 words (something short and funny)
(gif not mine)
You were having quite a good time, but that all quickly came tumbling down after Zack went after Mayfield. Going after Mayfield wasn't the problem, but the aftermath of the hit was the problem.
To be fair, he didn't start the fight, Chara did, but that didn't ease anything, "Holy crap." You watched in horror as everyone around you rose to their feet and cheered.
Someone put a comforting hand on your back, but it did nothing to soothe the panic you were feeling, "You idiot." You muttered, getting a couple laughs from the girls.
They punched at each other, and Zack managed to get a few good hits in before his helmet was thrown off. A couple more punches were thrown by Chara and Zack was on his knees, jersey was on the verge of coming off, and that's when the refs stepped in.
You sat down in your chair, mouth hanging open in shock as he was pushed off to the penalty box, but not before Chara made sure he was okay.
"You okay?" One of the girls asked with a laugh.
"He's the biggest idiot I've ever met in my life." 11 minutes later after the period was over and you knew Zack was in the locker room, you grabbed your phone and immediately called Zack.
"Hello?"
"You're the biggest idiot in the entire world." He laughed, "I don't know why you're laughing."
"It's funny, come on. I'm fine, he's fine, Mayfield's fine, we're all good." He tried to reassure.
"I'm hanging up now 'cause I'm mad at you."
"Well, you are the one who called."
"I hate you." You stated, then hung up.
-
"So, Zack, what was the consensus on the fight?" One of the interviewers asked.
Zack laughed, "Well, after the game, my girlfriend called."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah, she's here, so she saw everything in person, but she called me after the game and kinda chewed me out."
"I take it she's not keen on you fighting?"
"Oh, no, quite the opposite. She's the first person to cheer me on, but I think the part that really got her was the 6'9 part of it all." He joked, "I'll be in the doghouse for a bit, but it's all in good fun."
After media, he packed up all his stuff and got ready to head out. He saw you waiting by his car in the parking lot. You looked up at him from your phone and glared at him.
"Oh, come on." He laughed.
"Stop laughing. Nothing about this is funny." You punched his shoulder.
-
sydneyemartin: i think @/yourusername and i should start a club together. the "my significant other fought a 6'9 giant" club. you in, y/n?
12.3k likes
5.3k retweets
yourusername: oh, definetly.
hockeywags: the dynamic duo we didn't know we needed.
islesfan: y/n y/l/n and sydney martin taking the world by storm.
flyers6: these two are about to break the internet.
-
A few days later, you were on Gretchen Geraghty's, a YouTuber and one of the guys' girlfriend, podcast just to talk and have fun, "So, I've gotten some DM's after people found out you'd be on this week's episode..."
"Oh, boy..." You laughed.
"And I'm guessing my your reaction you know exactly where this is going?" She laughed.
"Is it about Zack?"
"It is about Zack?" She nodded, "For those who don't know o don't follow hockey, Zack plays hockey with Max for the Flyers, and a few days ago, Zack got into a fight with another player, and that player is like a giant."
"Oh, yeah. He's like almost 7 feet tall, and I'm not exaggerating."
"What was the consensus after the fight?"
"I got a lot of DMs from fans, and Zack got a lot from fans. Sydney Martin, Matt Martin's wife, another hockey player, tweeted about it. I woke up the next morning and was tagged in so many posts and my friends and family was just sending me memes. It was pretty great."
"I watched his post-game interview where he said you actually root for him when he fights."
"I usually do, because hockey is a sport where fighting is encouraged. And I'm obviously very nervous when he does fight, but I do root for him. This time was a little different because he was fighting a literal giant."
"Any injuries?"
"Got a bit of bruise forming." You laughed, "Nothing too serious. I made him see a doctor the day after."
-
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#every gif i found of him was literally him fight LMAOO#zack macewen x reader#zack macewen imagine#zack macewen imagines#zack macewen fic#zack macewen#nhl imagine#nhl imagines#nhl fic#nhl blurbs#nhl#hockey imagine#hockey imagines#hockey fic#hockey blurbs#hockey#philadelphia flyers imagine#philadelphia flyers imagines#philadelphia flyers fic#philadelphia flyers#taylor writes#taylor writes: hockey
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So! I'm taking it upon myself to summarize everything that happened to me before Watts showed up.
There's likely a lot of history that I am missing, likely with Gavamont, Ratazom, and Evilwizard, but this is just what I know. Forgive me if I mess up any details.
Before I joined the Council
When I first showed up, I got into a ruckus with the Council. Basically, they were (and still are) enforcing their laws and shit on a place where the gods had repeatedly told them to fuck off. That place is my home dimension.
This incident was specifically about taxes. I got into an—honestly very unfair, given that it took place in my home dimension and practically everyone there wanted the Council to fuck off—court case against the Council's only tax wizard at the time, @greywizard-reporter-jim.
The Council lost, and the god of justice (who really should take it's job more seriously, but I digress) teleported an adult thermonuclear moth into the City of Towers.
Unfortunately, I was stupid and told the Council that the moth was close to detonation and they promptly handled it.
I got Jim fired (sorry bout that) and started hanging out with him. Pretty cool guy, not gonna lie.
We did various things to fuck with the Council, including causing havoc at the... uhhh... I think it's called the Vault of Relics? Something like that. Anyways, all you need to know is that it's where the Council keeps their super powerful magic items. Side note, that was my first test of my Mithril Hydra!
Anyhow, while the bureaucratic fucks were distracted, Jim stole a bunch of documents from their archive.
We kept trying to fuck them over until I realized that I couldn't just defeat them. That's when I made my deal to join them to try to make change via policy rather than force.
Also, pretty soon after Jim started doing crime, his ex, @battlemageserioth, came after him. The story of how they got together is long and complicated, but basically Jim seduced Serioth to get a position on the Council. They were actually kind of in love but they were both complete messes at the time so it didn't really work out.
Working for the Council
I quickly became better acquainted with Serioth, and had a... friendly rivalry, I guess, with him. Basically, he was very devoted to the Council and didn't understand that it was pretty shitty.
He was tracking down Jim, but Jim learned how to combine tax magic an necromancy. Those skeleton mafia debt collectors are quite formidable.
Around this time, @djitch wanted to be a cook for the Council. I put in a good word with her, and she's currently working at a restaurant in the City of Towers that I cannot remember the name of.
Next big event!
The age of gretchen (aka everyone panics about a monster that ended up as a friendly eldrich horror)
Okay. So. @gr3tchn. You might know her from fucking with M.M. recently. She is basically the concept of hunger given physical form.
When she first appeared, I was one of the first people to respond. Uh, actually, before that, some context.
On Raazaa, attacks by monsters are very common. The big ones are by far the most dangerous. Well, except for the mermites. Those things will fuck you up. Anyhow, as a consequence of the preferred method of deterring giant monsters, my first response to seeing one is generally "hit it until it goes away."
I blasted a giant hole in Gretchen (sorry bout that) and she just turned into another mouth. By the by, she could barely talk at the time. The blast also sent a bunch of chunks flying everywhere.
Let's make this quick. Various pieces of Gretchen messed up a lot of stuff and met a lotta people. For example, @effervescent-and-frothy used to be a wizard but is currently Gretchen's... daughter?
@feyosha figured out that Gretchen changes based on context. For example, the bit that mothered Effer became very motherly, the one that visited @wizard-council-librarian became very studious, you get the gist.
By this point, Gretchen was fully sentient and I was just being stupid and rude by trying to fight her.
FeyOSHA "defeated" her by having sex with the giant eldritch horror. Not my kind of thing, but I don't judge.
...
Let's see... the next big event was...
Oh. That motherfucker.
Werill.
Serioth started having weird memory lapses. Nobody knew what was up until he wrote down that it was some sort of bug. He also was suspecting something up with Werill and a certain spot in the Board's chambers.
First, some background on Werill. He's a power-hungry shithead who was on the Board of Archmages, proposed a bunch of greedy bullshit, you get the gist.
Serioth went down a secret passage in the Board's chambers and found a massive underground... cathedral? I don't know. Anyways, Werill was in there, along with a LOT of memetovores. For those who don't know, a memetovore is a weird bug that eats memories.
Werill monolouged for a while before he sicced the little fuckers on Serioth and my guy barely escaped.
I heard all the commotion and went down to investigate. Werill was kinda kicking my ass too but I summoned my mithril hydra and that pretty effectively squashed the memory-eating bastards.
I managed to capture Werill, but I couldn't hope to kill all of the bugs and they had access to the underground portal room so they quickly fucked off to a buncha parts of this multiverse.
Now, cut to Serioth real quick. He and Jim are (I think, I could be wrong) still yearning for each other and Serioth's nearly memoryless subconscious lead him to Jim's old tower.
Something you need to understand is that Serioth was a revenant, clinging onto life via his duty to the Council. Now that the Council has betrayed him, he's fading away.
Anyhow, Jim turned him into a lich so that Serioth could live.
As for Werill, he's got a fucking false hydra in the ruins of the Council portal room, and we need to deal with soon.
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