Hey, and welcome to the short stuff, I'm Josh, there's Chuck and Dave and Jerry are both here in spirit. And this is short stuff. I'm sorry. This is. Or Schey of stay. I had a hard time with this episode research wise, because this HowStuffWorks article keeps talking about what a joke it is and how easy it is. And it's like it's not the Enigma code, but I didn't do pig Latin growing up, so it just still confuses me like I get it.

But I like I don't just hear someone speak it and I can say, oh, this is what they're saying. And that's a write it down and move a bunch of dumb letters around. Right. Right.

Yeah, you I'm right there with you. Like, I have to stop and think about it. You know how to say a certain word or spell it or what somebody's saying is very difficult to. But I think that's kind of because Piglet wasn't like the cool thing when we were growing up where we younger, we probably or I should say way, way older, we probably would have been a little better, Piglet. And it's just it is very easy to learn.

The rules of it are very easy. But to speak it fluently would be, I'm sure, very difficult and take a lot of practice for sure.

Yeah. And there are so many more things that you can do with your time there to try and be fluent in big letters.

But when you're a little kid in, the only the only thing to play with is a hoop with a stick that you chase down the hill, piglet. And it's pretty attractive, you know what I mean?

Yeah. So Pig Latin is we'll talk a little bit about the history in a sec. But basically, if you take the word cat and we got this from the House of Rick's article at Way is Way, patently, what is pig Latin? Si, that annoys me just reading it. So what you do with Cat, it would end up as atque so you take the letter at the beginning of the word, move it to the end, add the syllable a y and that's sort of it.

Right.

I mean that, that is all there is to it. So you'd have okay.

It's pretty simple AK and that's it. I mean that's all there, there really is to it. Like if you run into a word that has a couple of syllables, they use the example of kirtan. There's a couple of things you can do. You can say certain, okay, that's what I would do. But it's sure if you were like fluent in pig Latin, you might say, you know, each syllable gets messed around with this.

So you have Irkay ten, a no earthquake eighty, which I mean, like almost no one's going to know what you're talking about, especially at first. But if you and your buddy are really good at pig Latin, then you've got your own little language that no one can can come in to in your world. This is shatterproof.

That's right.

And there were some predecessors to pig Latin, the dog Latin and Hogge Latin, which they think the name Hogge Latin might have eventually gotten the pig Latin, even though Dog Latin and Hawg Latin were not anything like pig Latin. Apparently that was just like a fake Latin that people made up like Shakespeare. I think it did a little bit. I think dog Latin. And it's funny, they really explain the Shakespeare passage, which I don't even think we should get into, but oh no, no, no, you want to go start?

I'll be Holofernes.

All right.

Geez, everyone, we present to you a dramatic reading from Shakespeare's Love's Labor Lost. Hmm. Oh, I'm sorry, yeah, you're KOSDAQ, man, this is like a TV show didn't work. Oh, I'm Juk. All right, Coast Guard, go to thou hast it ad dunghill at the fingers ends as they say.

Oh, I smell false lutein dunghill for unjam.

And then I wait, wait and see. OK, here's an thing. We can't go over that again. So this article takes great pains to, to explain all that. And then at the very end says the joke is much funnier when you explain it at length. I'm like, no, that's never been true for any joke ever. Right?

Well, so but the point is, it's like what Shakespeare was calling this dog or hog Latin or dog Latin is basically more like Cockney rhyming slang than what we think of as pig Latin. He was replacing Dunghill for Unnim, which is fingernail, which was right.

Pretty clever wordsmith. Right. And it's funny, like it's pretty rich, the two of us just mocking Shakespeare right now.

But but this was like not it has nothing to do with pig Latin, even though they're like, clearly Latin was a direct predecessor, pig Latin, even even if they aren't similar. Somebody said, oh, we'll call this one pig Latin rather than hog Latin.

Yeah. And I think even Edgar Allan Poe mentioned both dog and pig Latin. I'm sorry, dog Latin and pig Greek. Yeah. And this was pretty disparaging of those. But again, it was not the pig Latin that we know. And maybe we should take a break and talk about when that dumb thing came around right after this way.

Cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha.

If you've got pets, you know, they're experts at the unpredictable. A true pinyon policy helps protect you from unforeseen financial costs with a medical insurance policy for your pet that pays for new and unexpected injuries and illnesses. And get this, they can pay partner to veterinarians directly. So you're not waiting on a reimbursement check when your pet is hurt or sick.

You want the best care, get true, pinyon and be protected. Visit Trouping Pinyon Dotcom to learn more and get a quote.

OK, Chuck, so pig Latin, as we understand it, was around by the late eighteen hundreds at the latest they think.

Yeah, there was I think in 1896, the it was in the Atlantic, rather, it says they all spoke a queer jargon which they themselves had invented. It was something like the well-known pig Latin that all sorts of children like to play with. And it looks like it was invented by kids to talk about stuff that their parents couldn't understand. That totally makes sense. And again, here's where that famous Enigma code line comes in, like the parents could, could crack it pretty easily.

The point was, I think maybe that it became cute and just widely appreciated because maybe this is my own personal theory. Kids thought that they were speaking in a way their parents couldn't understand and their parents did fully understand. So they allowed it to keep going on is like the secret language with with this kind of like little bit of, you know, delight at the childhood ness of the whole thing. That's what I think. That's why I think Pig Latin got traction originally.

Yeah. And it's it's kind of weird that I have such contempt for it because I've seen examples in movies and in real life where it usually seems like young girls have made up their own little secret language. And I just find that like exhaustively adorable and very funny and cool.

But there's something about pig Latin that just bugs me.

Oh, good one. Good one, Chuck. That was very good. Yeah. So one of the things that I love about pig Latin are twofold and they both come in the early 20th century. So Pig Latin basically had its golden age, its heyday, where it was like part of the popular culture and like the first three or four decades of the 20th century.

And it showed up, Chuck, in this this this song called Pig Latin Love, which was in Arthur Field's record from 1919. And did you listen to it?

Of course it's adorable. I looked it in school.

I looked everywhere to see if it's in the public domain and couldn't find it. So I'm not sure if we can play anything.

It's got to be I would think so, too. So we'll say let's play a little bit here. And then if you don't hear anything, it means that we found out it is in the public domain, in which case, go look it up yourself. But here's a little clip of Pig Latin Love by Arthur Fields.

Maybe crackly goodness. It really is. And so I just think it's an adorable, adorable song. But the fact that somebody had a popular song about this shows just how popular it was at the time, how how prevalent it was. And pig almost in pig culture, in pop culture, I'm sure in pig culture they're like, stop making fun of us.

We don't talk like that.

Yeah, we used to have an old Victrola with some old records and it was always kind of fun to to put those on like we never did it as a family, like, sit around, listen to him. But when friends would come over, I'd pop one on. Yeah, it's kind of kind of cool.

My dad had Jackie Gleason records. Oh, nice. And I used to tell him that they were so square, the records themselves were square.

He would be like, what do you mean? That's great. Yeah. So the other use I think you were probably talking about the Three Stooges, right? Yeah. Did you watch that, too? I didn't actually I didn't get around to that one. It's just adorable. I can't wait to do our episodes on The Three Stooges or five seven part episodes on the Three Stooges.

But there's a particular one in 1938 called Castles in the Air, where Moe and Larry are trying to teach curly pig Latin.

It's a good like full minute or so like lesson on pig Latin. Curly just can't quite pick up. But so he's like, so I'm O'May and that's lay in your early and curly goes cuz like no.

And I think he gets slapped as a result, but it's pretty cool. So here's the deal though. Pig Latin is not I mean technically it's a language but it's, it's really something called back slang or a coded language. It's not like I know we covered Esperanto many, many years ago on the show and like Klingon, those are really invented languages with vocabulary and grammar and syntax, and they don't rely on English as the basis of it. This is not that.

No, there's no pig Latin without English. That's it. Yeah. And it follows all of the same vocabulary rules. And like you said, Syntex and everything that English follows, it's just you're rearranging it a little bit. One of the other categories that pig Latin qualifies as a coded language, like the reason that this is done is to disguise what you're saying, even if it is not just kind of a feeble attempt to disguise, it still qualifies it as a coded language.

Yeah, and they're examples of stuff like this in other countries. Apparently in France, there's something called Verlan that switches up the first and last syllables of a word Spanish has here. Gonzales Oh, nice. I guess that's how you pronounce it, I guess, where you double the vowels and put a P between them.

So Gatta, which is Cat is Gabbar Toppo, which sounds kind of cool. It does make you take Japan.

OK, Japan has something. I was asking you about this. She knew exactly what I was talking about before. She called Baby Go Baby Aigo and G.O. indicates a language in Japan. So like English go or something like that would be the English language. This is like bouba language and it's because you insert B sounding syllables into the already extant syllables of words. So Souci becomes Subu Shib.

I love that word. Yeah. Supercheap BCB. Yeah. And that's barbacoa in Japan. Let's go get some supercheap.

I just think it's so great that everybody's like, yeah, this language is interesting but we can make it even even better. Let's try. Yeah. Kids, you know, kids are great. Well you got anything else. Got nothing else. I don't either so. Oh.

Or go or stay off.

No. Or Schey of day to day that. All right. Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, My Heart Radio, is it the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?