No Two Words Alike, Again

Learned Vol. 6, Issue 1, Redux

Mar 23, 2025

Our Redux series is rapidly coming to a close. After next week’s look back at Volume 7, Issue 1, the next volume of Learned will kick off on Thursday, April 3, 2025. Which is to say, that’s when I’m publishing it. When you receive will depend, of course, on which time zone you’re in and how far away that is from Tokyo. In the meantime, let’s revisit Volume 6, Issue 1.

In the run-up to Volume 6, I found myself answering a bunch of student questions that boiled down to “what’s the difference between A and B” where A and B are to words that either look alike, sound alike, or act alike. In answering those questions, I did a ton of research about synonymy, the process in which English, as a language, creates and uses synonyms. I decided that there were more than enough words to build an entire season out of them. And so I started writing.

I decided to call the series No Two Words Alike based on the idea that, in English, there are very, very few true synonyms. Instead we have a lot of words that are really similar, but different.

Unfortunately, life and burn out caught up to me about half way through the season and I ended up with far less than 52 issues for the first time since I started writing Learned. I called an official time-out about halfway through to try to pull a book together from the various essays I had published to that point. The book didn’t happen. One of these days though…

Synonyms are a pain in the butt.

Let me rephrase that. Synonyms are an ache in the bum. A soreness in the bottom. An injury to one's posterior. Perhaps even, a debasement of one's gluteus maximus1. Now, imagine for a second that you’re a student of English. That’s a lot of words for butt. Do they really all mean the same thing? Am I going to get in trouble for using bum instead of butt? Is posterior ever the correct word?

And how about pain? Do pain, ache, and injury really convey exactly the same meaning? How about debasement? Can you really replace the word pain in any given sentence with…debasement?

Leaving aside, for the moment, that none of these phrases actually mean what I want to say, that synonyms are troublesome and difficult, the answer to most of these questions is yes. These words can all replace each other. Sometimes. Maybe. Depending on the circumstances. And the context. Kinda. In other words, yes, these words are all synonyms but the caveats stack up quickly2.

2025: This is a surprisingly persistent and yet not-talked-about issue in teaching English as a Foreign or Second Language (EFL/ESL). We, as native speakers tend to just know when a word does or doesn’t match another word. Even when we consult a dictionary, we have an entire lifetime of usage to draw context from. In other words, I still there’s a book in exploring synonymy. I just have to find it.

So, what’s a synonym and why do we have so many?

Here’s the Merriam-Webster online dictionary on synonyms:

one of two or more words or expressions of the same language that have the same or nearly the same meaning in some or all senses

But, as for why we have so many, well, English, as you may well know, is something of a hodgepodge collection of a half-dozen different languages. Over the centuries, as each new language has been assimilated, new words have become available for the common user. Add in some technological and cultural innovations and their subsequent jargon, a bit of advertising, a little slang, and the inexorable march of time, and you have a language that is constantly growing and changing. Which means we end up with a lot of words that mean almost the same thing, or, synonyms. So how do we begin to sort out the mess that is lexical synonymy in English?

In the next paragraph, I give a definition from Blackwell’s Handbook. It holds up well, but over the past two years I’ve found a few places where it just isn’t sufficient and that makes sense - trying to create one rule that covers absolutely every base in English is a madman’s task.

The Blackwell Handbook of Linguistics3 provides a basic structure for thinking about synonyms. It classes synonyms into three categories: absolute, propositional, and near synonymy. Think of these categories as a shallow pyramid, with absolute at the top and near as the base.

*Pyramids. They’re all the rage on alien shores. Photo by Eugene Tkachenko on Unsplash.*

Absolut Top Shelf

Absolute4 synonymy is just what is sounds like - two words that have exactly the same meaning across all uses and iterations. They are vanishingly rare. So much so that I have had a hard time finding examples to use in this explanation5. One example I did find was airport and aerodome - the two words are limited enough in definition and use that they can reliably be substituted for each other. Even then, however, aerodome is so old-fashioned that you can argue it creates a different image in the receiver's mind. In other words, when you say airport, the listener might imagine a modern complex like LAX or Narita, but aerodome may cause them to think of the Graf Zepplin docked to the top of the Empire State Building.

Vote Yes on Prop. Synonymy!

Propositional synonymy is also pretty rare, but somewhat more workable6. The example given by the Blackwell Handbook of Linguistics uses begin and commence. In the context of a sentence like "Class began at nine," you can substitute in commence with no change in meaning. However, in another context, there could be crucial nuances differentiating between two words. Context is everything.

Nearly There

Which leaves us with near synonymy. These are the words we're used to thinking of as synonyms: big and large, beautiful and gorgeous, or, to use the Handbook's example again, kill, murder, execute, and assassinate. It's a fun book. But the key point is that synonyms have roughly the same meaning but that there are subtle differences and nuances that appear when the words are put into practice.

This is not actually the Graf Zeppelin. It never docked at the Empire State Building. Instead, this is an early example of photo manipulation, showing the Las Angeles at dock, something that never actually happened.

These differences might be caused by regionalisms, register, semantic context, or even the placement of emphasis by the speaker. To further complicate matters, we have the issues of idiom and metaphor. Returning to the example from the introduction, we use the phrase pain in the butt to emphasize how troublesome something can be, but, linguistically speaking, can we consider pain in the butt, as a single lexeme7 equivalent to troublesome?

If you’re a native or fluent speaker of English, then you already, intuitively have a sense of when two words can be synonymous. You already understand that a phrasal verb like look up and a standard verb like research can mean the same thing and know when to use which one. But, for learners of English, sorting out near synonyms can be a difficult process. For language teachers, guiding students towards an understanding of when and how to use different synonyms in different situations is, well, an embarrassment in the fundament.

The biggest change in this volume of Learned is that the personal anecdotes and stories took a backseat to more explanatory pieces. And while that was interesting for me, I discovered that you all want to read this because of my experience and my take on things, not just re-hashing what the dictionary already says. Lesson Learned.

This volume of Learned will be dedicated to talking about near synonyms - how and when they differ in meaning and usage, when and where they come from, and most importantly, when these differences matters and when they don’t.

I hope you'll come along for the ride.

These next three sections worked fairly well. I’ve always got other projects to promote and books to recommend, so they may return in Volume 8. I’m not sure yet, but I welcome feedback and opinions from everyone.

The Pitch

If you'd like to support my work and this newsletter, please consider becoming a subscriber. You'll get two extra newsletters a month discussing all the non-synonymy related stuff in my brain. If that's not in the cards at the moment, no biggie.

The Shameless Plug

I've got another substack newsletter called 91 Days where I share a week's worth of daily photos along with a short essay about photography and art.

What We’re Reading

All links to books discussed here go to A Very Learned Bookstore on Bookshop.org, meaning I'll get a small commission on any books purchased through these links.

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You

Janelle Shane

Between the chatbots and the artbots, it feels a bit like the a.i.s are just a few short years away from completely taking over the world. And that’s not completely untrue, but it may not happen the way you think.

In “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You,” author Janelle Shane, an a.i. researcher, walks you through how, exactly, machine learning works, what it is good at, what it can’t do, and why artificial intelligence is not going to take your job just yet.

Shane recounts her experiences and experiments training bots to do different tasks in a funny, engaging, and thoroughly set of anecdotes and stories that will, if not reassure you, then at least entertain you while the robots take over.

Share Learned

And now we have no signature at all, just a closing thought and then some random bits and pieces. Still, all in all, this was a fun series to research and write and I do think that one day, somehow, I’ll manage to turn it into a book. In the meantime, look for this idea of synonymy to be explored more in next week’s look at last year’s also-truncated season in Volume 7, Issue 1, Redux.

Read that with a Groucho Marx-esque waggle of the eyebrows, please

Metaphor and idiom are just as important in understanding a phrase like “pain in the butt,” but they’re outside the scope of this week’s discussion, which is metonyms. I mean synonyms. You know, words that have the same meaning.

Full citation: Cruse, D.A. The Lexicon. In: Aronoff, Mark And Janie Rees-Miller (Eds). The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell Publishing, 2002. doi 10.1111/b.9781405102520.2002.00012.x

If you’re old enough to understand the joke in the section header, you’re old enough to buy the next round.

Somewhat vexingly, googling it just returns lots of words that mean kind of the same thing as absolute

Which is why they're the middle of the pyramid

Fancy linguist talk for phrase.

Peripatetic Mix-up, Again

Learned Vol. 5, Issue 1, Redux

Joel Neff

Mar 16, 2025

Welcome back to the Redux series of Learned where I revisit the first issue of each previous volume and re-publish it with some additional commentary. Today, we’re up to Volume 5, Issue 1 and it’s one of my favorites for two reasons: one, I feel like this is where the modern era of Learned really begins, and two, as difficult as they were to make, I enjoyed being a “cartoonist” during this year and coming up with a weekly one-panel comic mostly related to the topic.

This volume also saw the introduction of proper footnotes (yeah!) and a lot more community interaction. This came about directly because of SubStack’s efforts to foster community through creating group-sharing opportunities, recommendations, and categories that let creators with similar content find each other.

In my case, I found a group of like-minded individuals with whom I am still in regular contact and who I consider close friends three years later. Sometimes, things are good. On to the issue itself!

This week: New year, new Learned! Wait, what? Don’t worry, all will be explained. But first, ever hear a word and think it was a word you knew only to find that it was, in fact, a totally different word? No? Oh. Uh, me neither. Anyway, on with the show!

Say It Again, But Slowly

‘Peripatetic’ makes me laugh as I say it out loud. I taught it to my dad the other week and now he uses it all the time. He says working the railways is peripatetic because they’re always moving around. — from “Favourite Uncle” by Ben Aaronovitch

With Rivers of London (retitled Midnight Riot in the U.S.) Ben Aaronovitch gave us the best take on British wizardry since Harry Potter1 in the form of Peter Grant, police officer, apprentice wizard, and general go-to for the rest of British law enforcement when things get weird. And things do get weird. Author Aaronovitch has put his characters up against rogue magicians, the fae, a couple of ghosts, and even a deranged god, give or take a few chapters. But, the series is best known for the namesake rivers of London, each of whom comes with its own goddess, thereby taking the idiom of making the city a character to its logical conclusion. In other words, they’re fun books. I like them.

2025 me: I did really enjoy beginning each issue with a quote. Unfortunately, sourcing a quote that is appropriate, or, in this case, from where the content is derived takes a lot of time. By about halfway through this volume I had picked up some extra classes and finding the time to write the newsletter while maintaining a full teaching schedule almost got the better of me. Foreshadowing, by halfway through the next volume, it did get the better of me and I broke my weekly streak for the first time.

But let’s talk about that quote2 up there. One reason I enjoy this series so much is that Aaronovitch has a habit of catching me off my guard and forcing me to re-evaluate words I thought I knew. And one reason I like them is that they challenge my vocabulary. In this case, I thought I knew the word ‘peripatetic.’ But the word I knew, or thought I did, doesn’t make any sense in the joke, no matter how hard I try to squeeze it in. So, it’s off to the dictionary we go:

From the New Oxford American Dictionary:

traveling from place to place, especially working or based in various places for relatively short periods

Huh. That literally describes my job. You would think I would know this word. And, I thought I did. Only, I thought it meant something along the lines of shrewd or cunning. To the thesaurus! “Shrewd” led me to a handful of entries, which I could narrow down to those that started with “per,” the idea being that since I was confused about peripatetic I could eliminate any words that didn’t bear any resemblance to it. As word-finding methodologies go, this one less than perfect, but it worked out anyway. There, in my list of results was “perspicacious.”

Merriam-Webster:

of acute mental vision or discernment

Huh. Well. Those are not the same at all. But I wanted to dive a little deeper. Namely, I wanted to know two things: are these two words related? And, how did I mix them up so badly?

The tone of this issue and this volume has shifted slightly. I consciously tried to move from professorial, “I’m the expert” to more conversational, “I’m a learner, too.” I think it was successful.

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, er, comic. I say comic but, obviously, I didn’t draw this illustrations. Instead, they’re much more like digital collages. I pulled a few source images from different collections and then layered them in over that blue background. Over the course of the volume, it got easier and I responded by upping the challenge and making the later ones in the series much more visually interesting. What I didn’t expect was that the different animals, especially these three, would develop distinct personalities with different levels of snark and empathy. I enjoyed making these comics and, looking back on them now, they’re much funnier than I remembered. To me, at least.

Etymology

Peripatetic is one of those words that seems to exist just for word nerds. The first entry in the dictionary is all about moving around, but the second entry (again from New Oxford) is one word: Aristotelian. As in Aristotle. That’s a bit of a jump, isn’t it? Well, not if you’re familiar with Aristotle’s practice of teaching on the hoof. As Word Origins The Hidden Histories of English Words from A to Z puts it:

the Greeks used it not simply for ‘walk around’, but specifically for ‘teach while walking around’ – an allusion to the teaching methods of Aristotle, who discussed and argued with his pupils and followers while walking about in the Lyceum

So here you have this grandiose, overly fancy word for itinerant that ties directly back to the father of modern philosophy (Greek to Latin to Old French to, finally, English in the 1600s for those taking notes) that has everything to do with a walk-and-talk to make Aaron Sorkin envious and nothing to do with being shrewd.

Perspicacious, as Etymoline tells us, appears at first to have some similar characteristics as it also comes from the 1600s and Latin. However, once we look past those coincidences, we see that the initial root comes from PIE and, most tellingly, stems from the root “per” meaning “through” and “spek” meaning “observe,” whereas the “per” in peripatetic is actually the Greek “peri” meaning “round” and “patein” which means “walk.”

One thing I’m quite happy with in this volume is that the quality of research went up a level. I had gone on a hunt for some tools to help explain the etymology of different words and found some good ones. I’ve read through the other issues in this volume and everything holds up. Good job, me!

Mix-Ups

Amazon gets vilified a lot these days and for pretty justifiable reasons. However, to give credit where it is due, I don’t think people have really come to grasp with just how much they have revolutionized reading as a pastime for many people through their Kindle devices and service. Besides the physical ease of reading multiple books for long periods, the fact that they have incorporated dictionary services into their ebook software is, by itself, a game changer. Don’t know a word? Simply tap on it and there’s the dictionary entry, no muss, no fuss.

Contrast this to when I was a young reader - seeing a word I didn’t know meant having to either stop where I was, find a way to mark my place in the book, go down the hall to my dad’s home-office, get the dictionary down off the shelf, find the word in question, read the (sometimes oblique) definition, then go back to my book and try to get back into the flow of the story Or, I could just skip it and carry on reading. Guess which one I did?

Now, on the face of it, I don’t think that guessing the meanings of words from context and just getting on with the story is a bad thing. In fact, it’s how those of us of a certain age were taught to read. We spent a lot of time with worksheets designed to get us to figure a word out from the way it was used and by what the words around it meant. And that is a very valuable skill. But it can also make us a little lax when it comes to making sure we really know the words we think we know.

So, all I can surmise is that somewhere along the way, I came across perspicacious, guessed what it meant, and carried on. Then, sometime later, I came across a similar looking word and shortcut my way to a mistaken definition. These things happen.

The idea encapsulated in the next paragraph didn’t work quite as well as I had hoped. In the beginning, I tried very hard to find words that I didn’t know, especially when I had a source I could point to, as in peripatetic. That quickly became difficult, not because I know all the words (although, ahem, I do) but because we, as English speakers, tend to use the same words over and over. New words often come with context that explains them, so it’s only rarely that someone uses a word that we don’t know. Instead, I had to pivot to thinking about how words we know acquire secondary or tertiary meanings, and that would become the focus of Volume 6 of Learned.

But that, in a nutshell, is the point of this 5th volume of Learned - we come across unknown words all the time. Maybe it’s a new piece of slang that the kids are using, maybe it’s an old word that someone has decided to dust off and re-purpose, maybe it’s just one we haven’t heard before, but, for whatever reason, here’s a word we’re not quite sure of so what do we do? We say it again, but slowly, and we figure it out.

Down the Rabbit Hole

This Reddit thread led me to this video by Adam Neely about Conlon Nancarrow with stops at this insane YouTube channel that makes the most bizarrely incredible piano music I’ve ever seen. Set some time aside and dive deep into impossible music3.

The Rabbit Hole and Archives sections made their return and their debut, respectively with this issue and both worked quite well over the year. I may have to re-introduce them yet again for Volume 8.

From the Archives

It’s funny, although I’d had a Kindle for years at that point, I hadn’t really gotten into exploring all the social features Amazon was slowly baking into the devices and software. But, in the lead-up to Learned Vol. 2, Issue 27: Smooth Seas, (originally published September 30, 2019) I started doing just that, especially by highlighting bits of text and sharing them out on the interwebs4. All of which led into this issue, which is all about word art. Enjoy!

And now, at long last, just below this closing line are the beautiful, beautiful footnotes! Enjoy and see you next week for a look at Volume Six, Issue 1 and Volume Seven, Issue 1. The week after that Learned returns with Volume 8, Issue 1. Thanks for reading and hope to see you there.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, has done so without disenfranchising a minor but disproportionately vulnerable portion of the fan base.

Favourite Uncle is actually a short story in the Rivers of London universe. It stars Abigail, Peter’s cousin, who is a budding young investigator herself, like an urban Nancy Drew for the Harry Potter crowd.

Down the Rabbit Hole is likely to be a weekly feature. Back in Volumes 2 and 3 of Learned, I had similar sections and I kind of miss them, so they’re back! Don’t expect too much from them, they’re just a space for me to drop in a topic completely unrelated to Learned’s main feature.

It’s not lost on me that, although I quote from a book at the beginning of this issue, I didn’t do the Kindle quote feature. There are two reasons for this - one, I wanted to getting back to featuring some of the amazing work that shows up on Unsplash, and two, I hope that not every quote for this volume is going to come from a book and I wanted to keep the look consistent.

What's in a word? Again?

Learned Vol. 4, Issue 1, Redux

Joel Neff

Mar 15, 2025

Volume 4 of Learned debuted on March 29, 2021. At the time, three years into Learned, I felt like I was just starting to understand how newsletters could become something more than just a weekly blog. To that end, I decided to call the series “What I Talk About When I Talk About Words.” After some workshopping with friends, I decided to keep that name to myself.

Over the course of the next 52 issues, I explored the words we use to talk about other words. Words like phrase and clause all the way up to words like novel and book. In other words, I tried to start with a single word and build up to a full book. I mostly succeeded, albeit with a few sidetracks and rabbit holes here and there.

I had the thought (and still have, some days) to turn this season into a book. As a result, I dug a little deeper into the research and made sure to pull my definitions from authoritative sources as much as possible, quoting instead of just linking.

And I put some more time into trying to do my own, original illustrations, too. The photos I used for this volume would soon become anathema to me…

This week: trying to define the word, word. Then, footnotes, housekeeping, and a bit of trivia to get us out. Let’s dig in.

What’s in a word? Or, actually, what is a word? I mean, over the past three years, for this newsletter, I’ve written over 130,000* words about words without ever really stopping to talk about what a word is. Which is ridiculous, because we all know what a word is, right? So, what?

Quick story: It’s a boring day at work circa 1999 and so I’m looking to kill a little time chatting rather than do anything actively productive, so I pull up ICQ** and send a quick message to my friend Elle. “What’s the word, yo?” Now, to me, early 20s, raised on a steady diet of Yo, Mtv Raps, this should read as “What’s up?” But tone is really hard to read on the internet. She gets back to me right away. “The word ‘yo’ is an interjection.” Not a drop of irony in sight. Whatever, we had a good laugh about it.

A 100% accurate representation of our conversation.

But here’s the meta: In both my unintentional question and Elle’s answer, we understood “word” to mean two totally different things. For her, it marked a distinct grammatical point from which a factual inquiry could be deduced. For me, it became a metaphor symbolizing her current whereabouts and doings. In other words, in that moment, her definition of word differed from mine.

Note from 2025 me: Since I first wrote this post, I’ve begun using that same story as part of my introductory lectures in some of my classes as an illustration of why it is important to be precise in your language. The students who get it, love it. I wish more students got it.

This confusion over how to define word represents one of the underlying difficulties of science: where do you start? Famously, Carl Sagan said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Okay, not completely applicable, but, still, where do you start? How do you use the word, word, to define other words if you do not first have a definition of word?

So, let’s back up. Let’s find a definition for “word.”

2025: I realize, as I have read back through this, that I never really offered a definitive definition of “word.” I looked through a few books I’ve acquired since writing this, searching for a more concrete meaning. There isn’t one. Everyone still agrees that word is just a word and we all know one when we see one but that there are so many exceptions and challenges that it’s impossible to come up with one definition that really works.

The Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics offers this definition for word: “Term used intuitively in everyday language for a basic element of language.” Which they then follow up immediately with, “numerous linguistic attempts at defining the concept are not uniform and remain controversial.” Great. Clears that up.

The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar does slightly better: “A meaningful unit of speech, which is normally not interruptible, and which, when written or printed, has spaces on either side.” The dictionary goes on to give two additional characteristics - words can’t be rearranged and still retain meaning. So, if I take all the letters (or sounds) from word and rearrange them into dwor, which has no meaning I’m aware of, I have fundamentally altered word making it something new and distinct. The second characteristic is that words are often the smallest unit of sound that can “reasonable constitute a complete utterance.” The examples they give are words like yes and no. However, as they themselves acknowledge, this is not a 100% true rule. After all, I could answer a question with nuh uh. Does that make nuh uh a word? Two words? The debate rages on.

One of my favorite into to linguistics textbooks, The Secret Life of Words gets into the difficulties of trying to define what a word is. They use the example of cat: “When each of us learned the word cat, we encountered different cats, yet we arrived at some shared concept of ‘catness.’” It’s this idea, that of a shared understanding of a class of things or ideas that forms the core of their definition of word. When I use the word cat, you understand that I am referring to a class of objects or symbols that generally conform to our shared understanding of small-furry-creature-that-is-not-a-dog. But of course, even this is not a perfect definition because, under it, we would need to consider each identically shaped (or sounded) instance of cat that did not refer to not-a-dog as a new word. Like the big, yellow tractors that are sometimes called cats. Or the play / movie called Cats. Or the mid-century slang that called cool people cats. So, is cat one word or a dozen?

Even taking these definitions (or non-definitions) into account, we haven’t seen anything that addresses the miscommunication between Elle and myself all those years ago. We might be able to innately understand what a grammatical word is, but what about a metaphorical one? Is there an appreciable difference between word and the word? We’ll get to that next week.

Footnotes:

156 issues of Learned of approximately 800 words per issue (124,800) plus 26 issues of The Glossary at approximately 300 words per issue (7,800) plus one special edition of 2000 words equals 134,600 words.
For the younger readers: ICQ was to 1999 desktops what WhatsApp and Snapchat are to smart phones today. Only with much better color schemes. And fonts. And no emojis. Man, I miss ICQ.

It’s funny to think that at this point in 2021, SubStack did not yet have the ability to build in footnotes. I think that comes about sometime during the middle of this series, but I can’t remember when I started using them. I do know I spent a long time making all these footnotes by hand. Oh, and now that we’re in 2025, maybe we’ll finally get the ability to center headlines…

Notes & Asides:

Welcome to Volume 4 of Learned. Slightly new format, but not too different from what you’re used to, I hope. That said, I’ve left this little bit here at the end where I plan to try a few experiments with little pieces of news, interesting facts, quotes, and so on and so forth. If you have anything you’d like to see me do in this space, let me know by replying to this newsletter or by leaving a comment.

In the meantime, feel free to share this issue with your friends. And, if you’re enjoying the newsletter, please consider subscribing. Subscribers get an extra monthly issue where I go more in-depth on some of the news and events happening in linguistics and related fields throughout the world and it helps me out. This newsletter doesn’t cost much to produce, but it takes a fair bit of time, so any contribution is greatly appreciated.

Trivially Yours:

Depending on who you ask and how you count, English has between one and four million words. The average college-educated adult knows somewhere between 20 to 50 thousand but only uses about 10 to 15 thousand on a daily basis.

Stay curious,

So, the signature is down to just a single initial and the sign off down to just a single phrase. How long before I just get rid of them completely? Stay tuned for tomorrow’s issue where we look back at the first issue in Learned Volume 5.

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ASMR, Again

Learned Vol. 3, Issue 1, Redux

Joel Neff

Mar 09, 2025

Volume 3 of Learned launched in April of 2020. It feels like there was something momentous happening in the world back in spring of 2020 but I just can’t quite remember what it was. Anyway, Volume 3 is the first year of deep dives into words and their etymologies for Learned. I took a lot of what I had liked about Volumes 1 and 2 and tried to combine them into a simplified, more personal newsletter.

And that made sense considering that not only were we in the middle of a pandemic, I was finishing up my master’s degree, working full time (suddenly online), and still had a small child at home. So, Volume 3 was dubbed the “the no-frills, no fat season” and away we went.

Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at some of the odder things you might find yourself wondering about. I’m Joel, professional educator and amateur word nerd and this week, I learned about ASMR.

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Hang out on YouTube long enough and you’ll come across videos of someone making soft, gentle noises of some kind. They might be gently whispering a lullaby, turning the pages of a book, or just…breathing…at you. Collectively, these kinds of videos are known as ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, and they’re meant to make you feel good.

Me from 2025 again: This was the first year I really tried to put myself forward as the author and owner of a newsletter. Substack was starting to take off as more and more people found it and I was suddenly overwhelmed with the need to “own my brand.” This year I also eschewed the home grown graphics in favor of pictures vaguely related to the subject. I did really enjoy that part, just putting in the key word as a search term and seeing where the rabbit hole took me…

Filed under “relax” - Photo by Romello Williams on Unsplash

Basic facts (Wiki, Vox, Sleep.org, Psychology Today):

many people feel a physical sensation akin to a shiver in your spine
these sensations can be triggered by a number of things like the ones mentioned above, but
it is a very personal trigger, which is why there are so many subgenres
there are two broad categories of ASMR - natural sounds and
personal attention - someone talking to you or otherwise giving you their attention
although the physical response is pleasurable (to most people) it is not sexual
modern descriptions, categorization, and study effectively began in 2007

I became aware of ASMR videos some years ago, took a quick look at a few and decided, eh, not for me. And that’s more or less where the matter stood until…ok, one of my favorite games and one that I spend way too much time in is The Sims 4. Sims 4 fans can be roughly divided into two categories - players and builders. I’m one of the latter. I rarely play the game as it is meant to be played and instead spend hours building houses that would cost a small fortune if they were ever built in real life.

I don’t play the Sims much anymore but I still watch the Devon Bumpkin YouTube channel. It’s still very relaxing. If there was any good thing to be taken from the pandemic it’s that a lot of creators suddenly found their calling and began making very entertaining videos on YouTube and TikTok. Many of them are still at it, five years later and, although it’s extremely parasocial, I still enjoy their work.

YouTube Channel Devon Bumpkin is hosted by a very talented Sims 4 builder named Aden. A few days ago, during a build video, he mentioned that one of his next projects would be an ASMR video. Two things jumped out at me, almost simultaneously - one was my own reaction of mild disbelief and a feeling like I could skip that one, but the second was Aden’s own reaction. He said that it was a bit silly as ASMR videos didn’t do much for him, but he knew some of his fans really liked them because they helped with anxiety and so he’d do one for them.

I’m always on the lookout for a good anxiety remedy. Especially these days. So, I decided to dip back into the waters of ASMR. Unfortunately, it’s not my thing. Of the various videos I tried, honestly, most of them just bored me and a few creeped me out. I’m not linking them because I don’t want to add any negativity to what those creators do. They do their thing and if it works for them, great. Just not my thing.

Don’t get me wrong - a calm, soothing voice speaking reassurance does wonders for all of us, but I need the content of the words, not just the sounds. Like this: Sandi Toksvig on YouTube.

But, for people who do get a physical sensation from people whispering or soft noises or other types of videos, they do seem to have a positive effect against anxiety. The phenomenon has not been widely studied, but anecdotal evidence suggests that, well, it works for the people it works for. In these very stressful times, you might try a few and see if it helps.

And that’s it. That's the first issue of Learned Vol. 3, the no-frills, no fat season. Feel free to comment or to talk to me on Twitter about what you liked and didn’t like about this issue.

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Stay safe, stay curious. Learn something.

Joel

See, signing my name and everything. That’s how you build a brand! Or not. I still don’t know. See you next time for Volume 4.

Jack of All Trades, Again

Learned Vol. 2, Issue 1, Redux

Joel Neff

Mar 08, 2025

Here we are, April 2019 and Learned is getting started with its second year. The first things you’ll see is that the formatting has changed significantly. All the banner images you’ll see in this issue were made by me, just for this project. And I did that every week, throwing small and subtle changes into several of them because I am an utter masochist. And in fact, this volume of Learned is as complicated as it ever got. From here on in, every year would see me revise the format in (mostly easier ways).

On to the content. Learned, Vol. 2 was my first attempt at assigning a theme to the entire year’s worth of newsletters. And for this first attempt, I picked idioms. Yup. Every week, I’d tackle a new idiom and thus, in addition to being the most difficult to format, Volume 2 was also the most time-consuming to research. That said, it was probably the most fun to put together. In particular, the “Meanwhile” and “Sidetracks” sections (towards the bottom) took way more time than they were worth.

I’m proud of this volume of Learned and I’m pleased to take this chance to look back at the first issue of it. I hope you enjoy it.

"What kind of writing do you want to do?"

I had just joined the creative writing club and didn't have an answer. I just wanted to write. I hadn’t thought beyond that. I finally blurted out that I wanted to write short stories and novels and non-fiction books and...

"So, you're like a jack-of-all-trades, then?"

Right. Wait, what? Usually, when we call someone a jack-of-all-trades we mean that they are good at a lot of different things. There’s a second half to the phrase though - master of none - which implies that because the “jack” in question has worked at so many different things, they’re not exceptional at anything.

Hi, it’s me from 2025. Once again, I’ll throw in some personal comments in italics. Thanks for reading! While I had done personal essay bits in Volume 1, Volume 2 is where I started trying to really weave in personal history and anecdotes. Didn’t always work…

Take, for example, these two t.v. shows: In the early 2000s, Bruce Campbell starred in a t.v. show called "Jack of All Trades." Campbell played Jack, a spy who could blend in seamlessly just about anywhere because he was, well, a jack-of-all-trades - someone who could do anything well enough to get by. In contrast, the 2015 Aziz Ansari's show "Master of None" takes the opposite tack - Ansari's character is a struggling actor and comedian, someone who hasn't quite mastered any one discipline and is therefore struggling to be good enough to do anything.

Which one had my teacher meant? That I would be able to do many things well? Or that I wouldn’t be able to do anything really well?

When I asked, Mr. K told me of Lazarus Long and this quote:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

In other words, there’s nothing at all wrong with being a jack-of-all-trades. What a relief. I like being a jack-of-all-trades. After all, the entire point of this newsletter was to allow me to keep experimenting and learning new things. And I'm good at, or at least competent at, lots of things. But I wouldn’t call myself an expert at anything…

I’ve come back to this quote quite often in the past few years. It feels ever more relevant as we head deeper into AI territory where the machine is the generalist and you’d better have some expert level domain knowledge if you want to compete…

Two things appear a lot when you start to dive into the idea behind this idiom - the 10,000 hour rule and imposter syndrome.

The 10,000 rule was coined by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers and it suggests that the time needed to become a master, or expert, at any given thing is around 10,000 hours, or roughly three hours of practice a day for ten years. When put in perspective like that, it makes sense. Imagine a mechanic who’s on the job for a decade or so. By the end of that time, you’d expect them to be an expert mechanic.

Here’s the trouble - define expert. If our mechanic has spent all those years repairing lots of different types of cars, does that make them an expert in car repair or a “master of none” because they haven’t specialized in one particular make? Or how about this idea: who do you want repairing your car - the amateur who’s not so experienced but has done nothing but work on this model, or the professional who’s worked with lots of types of cars?

It might be better to look at a tangentially related word: masterpiece. Taken literally, a master's piece was the work an apprentice completed to be considered a master at their craft. How long would it take an apprentice to be able to do this? The answer, of course, is completely variable, but that's one place from which we get the 10,000 hour rule - the idea that we put in time every day over years and get better and better.

The 10,000 hour rule has come up for some debate over the past few years; regardless of how many hours expertise actually takes, becoming an expert somewhat misses the point. I’ve decided, in recent years, that I, personally, am better off being an adherent of “kaizen,” a Japanese word that is often translated as “betterment” but also implies continuous improvement. I think it’s more fitting.

College Student @ColIegeStudent

The horrifying moment when you're looking for an adult for help and you realize you are an "adult."

Imposter syndrome is what’s being referenced in all those memes and jokes wherein someone, presumably an adult, is looking around for a “better” adult. It’s the idea that, even with training and experience, you don’t feel as though you belong and that you don’t know what you’re doing. Paradoxically, this feeling occurs more often in people who are experts than in people who don’t because experts are often aware of how much they have yet to learn or experience about their field. Given this, many people who might be perceived by others as a master will often downplay their expertise.

Being a jack-of-all-trades is the default mode for most of us, especially in modern times. Whether that's because we need more skills in more areas to get through daily life or because we, as a species, have so much knowledge available to us that knowing any one field to any depth is to acknowledge how much we don't yet know, I'm not sure. I would like to be a master and to that end, I study and I take courses and I write newsletters about it all. The trouble, for me, comes in trying to decide which one thing to become a master in, and so I remain a jack-of-all-trades, but hopefully, also, a master of some.

“Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than master of one.”

Jack of All Trades

Definition: a person who is skilled in many different areas
Categorized as a figure of speech by Wikipedia
Coined in 1612 by Geffray Mynshul in “Essays and Characters of a Prison”
Derived from Johannes Factotum, or Johnny-do-it-all.

Master of None

I did like this part of the format, just putting the key data into a simple list with links. People never clicked on them.

Notable Events of the year 1612

You’re reading Learned, a weekly newsletter about words and language, written by me, Joel Neff. If you like what you see, please consider subscribing:

More information can be found on the About page, or by contacting me through email, twitter, or instagram. Thank you for reading.

All About Jack

One question that came up repeatedly in all my reading about “Jack of All Trades” was, why Jack? The most common explanations seemed to be that jack often just meant man or person and that, over time, the phrase became degraded so that man became man with low status. Eventually, man with low status became equated to thing, so that jack was now a catch-all word for small, unimportant item.

This kind of linguistic entropy fascinates me. We see this all over the place in English so that something that once had a common, everyday meaning has become something uglier or more spiteful. Bitch, for example, has gone from a basic term of animal husbandry to, well, you know.

This isn’t unique to English, either. In Japanese, the word kisama has changed from you to you son of a bitch. Written with the characters for lord (as in, person ranking higher than oneself) and the polite suffix (often translated as honored as in honored customer, etc.), the meaning has changed from being a very polite way of addressing someone to, well, the exact opposite.

And, speaking of opposites, we see a lot of that in English as well - words that used to be offensive and are now everything from silly to inane to positive. Golly, for example, used to be blasphemous, scumbag used to mean a used condom, and wicked used to mean, er, wicked.

Next Time: Small town life in a one horse town. That’s it. Stay strong, stay curious. Learn something.

Dang it. Out of space. ‘Til next time, from 2025, thanks for reading.

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