Visit theallusionist.org/bufflusionist to listen to this episode and find out more about it
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, invite language over the threshold.
Today’s episode is all about language matters in the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, yes. A version of this episode originally appeared on the podcast Buffering the Vampire Slayer. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen the TV show - and at the time of recording, I had only seen a handful of episodes - because this Bufflusionist is packed full of the etymological goods: vampires, covens, military slang, spooky Latin, wigs, and liquid beef. Many thanks to Buffering the Vampire Slayer for getting me on to face their listeners’ language questions with hosts Kristin Russo and Jenny Owen Youngs, who is also my cohost on my other podcast VMI, and you’ll remember her from this show a couple of years ago, she cowrote and performed our Festive Hit for 2020 which was a lovely episode. It’s not really the season to listen to that again… but I’m already being deluged with online ads for luxury advent calendars so maybe the season is fine, yeah, do it, listen to this first though.
There are some swears in this episode.
Just to quickly mention there is one show left on the Your Name Here tour of Aotearoa New Zealand, at the Auckland Writers’ Festival on 27 August 2022. Get your tickets at theallusionist.org/events.
On with the show.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Oh! Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Buffering the Vampire Slayer, a podcast where we’re usually talking about Buffy one episode at a time. But today, we are breaking out the linguistic microscope with a very special guest, to examine elements of language in the show. Please welcome my friend, and Kristin’s less close friend, Helen Zaltzman.
HZ: It makes it sound like Kristin and I have got beef.
KRISTIN RUSSO: I know, it does: it makes it sound like we used to be close but then, like, something came between us. Betwixt us.
HZ: But the truth is, we just haven’t spent enough time together yet to get to the point where we have beef.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: We have a lot of questions for you.
HZ: Well, I love to answer lots of questions.
KRISTIN RUSSO: We’re gonna start at what I felt would be a good beginning place, which was a question from Alicia: “Why is Buffy named Buffy? I’ve heard it’s short for Elizabeth, which sounds odd to my ears. But is there any kind of linguistics history around why the name or nickname Buffy would be chosen for a vampire-slaying heroine? When I first saw the show, it threw me off, especially as no one really comments on her name being unusual.”
HZ: Hmm. Well, there’s not a linguistics history so much as there is Joss Whedon history. He was asked about it in an interview, ages ago — I think 2003? And he said, “It was the name I could think of that I took the least seriously. There is no way you could hear the name Buffy and think, this is an important person. To juxtapose that with ‘vampire slayer’ just felt like that kind of thing, a B movie. But a B movie that had something more going on, that was my dream.”
KRISTIN RUSSO: That’s the kind of stuff I had in my head as well, that the name was picked to specifically turn the idea of a tiny blond girl in the alley, who could kick your ass, on its head. So, why not pick a name, like you said, that you would take the least seriously.
HZ: It’s a name you can imagine someone giving their cat and you wouldn’t think that odd. But I had seen some people speculating that he named her after Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Canadian musician. Buffy Sainte-Marie would be a cool name icon. But I haven’t seen Joss Whedon confirm it. And apparently the network really hated the title. And he refused to change it.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Yeah, stuff it, network.
HZ: Exactly. But I wonder how many people with the full name Elizabeth there are who use this shortening.
KRISTIN RUSSO: How the hell do you get from Elizabeth to Buffy?
HZ: Oh, people are wild, Kristin, with nicknames. Like Peggy being short for Margaret. How did they get there?
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: And Molly being short for Mary? Which it’s not any shorter than. KRISTIN RUSSO: Not short. That’s an extra letter.
HZ: No. People go a lot of places with Mary. Also, Elizabeth means ‘sabbath’. So that’s interesting as well, to think, like, Buffy means something as religious as that.
KRISTIN RUSSO: On the Hellmouth. It’s such a Christian…
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: She is always wearing a cross.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Yeah, I mean. That’s actually kind of cool, maybe unintentional. Because there is such a rootedness around the Hellmouth and there’s a lot of Christian shit in this show, as we have talked about a few times.
HZ: That is true. Not so much Jewish shit, though?
KRISTIN RUSSO: No. As a matter of fact, like, the exact opposite. Because Willow is Jewish, in the fact that she says she is Jewish and mentions it, like, two times—two to three times, you know, in the series, and it’s kind of not spoken about. But it’s really interesting, for a million reasons: one is that she’s on a Hellmouth and there is no hell in [Judaism].
HZ: Mm. It’s just a mouth.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Right, it’s just a mouth.
HZ: Just a sinkhole.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: This question is from Imogen in Oxford. Unclear whether it’s Lyra’s Oxford, Will’s Oxford or somebody else’s Oxford. Imogen says, “In ‘Restless’, Dream Riley keeps calling Buffy ‘killer’ instead of ‘slayer’, much to her confusion. This is a theme that comes up a few times, e.g. Faith in ‘Who Are You’, affirming that she’s not a killer, she’s a slayer. Is there any linguistic or etymological distinction between these terms? What’s the history of both of them? In other contexts, I feel like they’re used pretty interchangeably.”
HZ: Really?
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: “But in the show, a distinction is drawn and becomes quite a defining trait for slayer identity.”
HZ: In what other context is ‘slayer’ used? I don’t feel like they’re used that interchangeably in my life. But I’m a sheltered person.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: You distinguish between when you’re killing and when you’re slaying, Helen? Okay.
HZ: Absolutely.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: It’s important.
HZ: I think there’s a lot of etymological distinction. Those are completely different words. I was interested to find that both of them originally meant to injure someone, just not fatally. And then got more fatal.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: And then things got out of hand?
HZ: I think slayer was an earlier word than killer. And kill came from an Old English word, cwellan, which is like the word quell, which is much gentler than kill, even though it’s only subtly different. There’s a noun ‘slay’ that means an instrument on a weaver’s limb to beat up the weft, which is from the same root, because it means to strike; and there’s a last name Slaymaker, who is someone who makes slays, as in slays for the weaving.
KRISTIN RUSSO: For the weaving?
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Cool.
HZ: Incredible.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Wow.
HZ: But I think, in Buffy’s case, she favors slayer over killer because killer is generic, right? There are all sorts of people who are killers. Slayer is a calling. Slayer is kind of noble, in that she sacrificed her life for doing that. Killer is any old murderer. You know? Or exterminator.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Yeah, it does, it feels more common. You know? Anybody can do it. But in my own mind, you know, I can’t really separate it from the fact that I probably came to the word slayer via Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
HZ: And that’s funny, isn’t it, because I don’t think any of us would puzzle out what that means, if we’d never heard the word slayer before. But I don’t know that - well, I suppose I’d heard of the band Slayer, but that’s still marginal, isn’t it? It’s not in my daily vocabulary.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Iain from cloudy Scotland asks, “Why is Latin still associated with spooky things?”
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Well, it’s a dead language, Kristin!
HZ: It’s a ghost language that just won’t die! I think because it is a language of religion; it was the official language of Catholicism until really recently, I think until the 1960s. And not only that, it was also the language of science. And for a long time, there was so much more crossover with what we would now separate into magic or occult and science than there is now. So broadly, I’d say that was it. And then you have, like, a lot of things that were scientific then, like alchemy, where people were just trying it. And now you would think, well, that’s some crank stuff —
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Crazy until it works.
HZ: So I think that was another thing: people were intoning this stuff in quite serious and boomy and repetitive ways. And if you associate Latin with that, then it’s not much a leap to be like, okay, well, use that because people automatically feel the kind of thing where it’s familiar but unfamiliar. It feels historical and elevated and mysterious, but comprehensible enough just because if you speak a language derived from it, you’re like, “oh, that word sounds a bit like this.” But Latin’s very privileged. It’s got all this respect and this global botanical and scientific impact. Then you’re like, why did you get it? The Roman empire fell in, what? 450 AD? Yet Latin’s still going great. For a dead thing.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Going strong. Even being dead cannot stop it from pervading.
HZ: Because people just keep perpetuating it. You know, “I’ll just take the Latin out for one last dance.”
KRISTIN RUSSO: Yeah, and it’s never the last dance.
HZ: Never. Just keeps on dancing.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Alright, coming in from Barbados, this question is from Khalil, who asks, “What is the origin of the word ‘coven’? Did it always mean witches?”
KRISTIN RUSSO: I love this question.
HZ: No. It has the same root as “convent” and that’s what it meant. For men, as well. And it’s basically, like, you know the word ‘convene’? It’s the same word as that. Like, it’s a coming together or like an assembly, so people gathering. And I guess a convent was where people gathered to do religious observance. And then it became witchy in the 1660s, probably. I don’t know whether that was just, like, a particularly hot time for witch gathering. When was, like…I would have thought, like, the big times for witch burnings were a bit earlier than that. But maybe that was one-off witches, rather than covens.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Well, when was the big plague?
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: The big one?
HZ: Oh. Well, there were a few big plagues. But there was one that ended in 1666, so -
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Auspicious.
KRISTIN RUSSO: But isn’t that the plague where we got the root of alewives from? Because alewives were making beer, which people could drink without getting sick, because they were boiling the water. But they didn’t, like, connect the fact that it was the boiling of the water that made them able to drink the beer. So people were drinking a lot of beer, and alewives were making a lot of beer. And then they were making money on their own and they didn’t need husbands. And then they were defamed by the Catholic church because the Catholic church didn’t want women making their own money. And that’s where they got branded as witches. And they wore pointy hats…
HZ: Can’t trust single independent woman.
KRISTIN RUSSO: And I don’t know if I have the right plague. But I do know that if I do, then that would make a lot of sense for ‘coven’ to also be pivoting around that time. Because it was really when the idea of a witch was first branded, almost—literally, kind of branded. Like, marketed.
HZ: It was popularized by an earlier plague, in the 1300s. And actually by the 1600s, the men had managed to come in and seize the brewing industry and start pushing out the alewives. Fuck’s sake. So I don’t know if it had as much to do with witches. There was a lot of religious turmoil that may have resulted in people being like, “You know what, let’s take it out on the witches again.” It’s always an easy win. The term, even though it had been around for witches since about 1660, it didn’t really take off until the 1920s when the anthropologist and folklorist Margaret Murray popularized this idea of witches gathering in covens of thirteen people, as a sort of witchy analog of Christ and the twelve disciples. But this theory is widely discredited. And then someone else was like, well, it might just have been that thirteen was a convenient number to fit in a nine-foot coven house. I don’t know where they get this shit from, honestly. I think witch-history and -science is not necessarily built on the most solid foundations, you know?
KRISTIN RUSSO: You have to really raise at least one eyebrow at how much connective tissue there is between Christianity and these concepts of magic and witches and covens. They just always seem to be together. They always seem to be hanging out.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Almost as if the church doth protest too much, methinks.
HZ: The Wile E. Coyote to witches’ Roadrunner.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Mary Megan from Connecticut says, “I’m really curious about the etymology of 90s slang ‘wigging.’ In Buffy, we hear characters say “gives me the wiggins”, “wiggy” and “wigging out”, excuse me for paraphrasing. Where does this come from?”
HZ: Wigging out, you say, is 1990s slang - it’s not, it’s 1950s slang. And it was probably, like, saying “to flip your wig.” If you’re wigging out, you’re in such a state of agitation that your wig is dislodged. And I think that kind of slang has actually been around for way longer. I guess because wig-wearing was associated with fancy people of the past. And like, if you had a really tall wig, it was such a status symbol, the taller, the better, for the more power. So that’s why you had “bigwig” as well, like, if you had a big wig, you were an important one. But also, wig was used as an analogy for the human head, which hair is, often, as well. Like the word poll, when you go to vote, it was because they were counting people, doing a headcount. But they would say “hair” instead of head count. So I think wig was similar. And then, you had a lot of early 20th century African American slang, which is where I think the whole flip on wig came from, and lots of other things. A wig picker was a psychiatrist in the 1960s.
KRISTIN RUSSO: So “wig” really was just, like, a shorthand in a lot of cases for your head.
HZ: Yeah. And then “wiggins,” that’s a Joss Whedon-ism. And to be fair to him, I don’t love to give him credit, but that is a convincing-sounding slang to come up with, I guess because ‘wig’ was already in people’s vocabularies and it’s quite a funny sounding word, “wiggins”, “Gives me the wiggins.”
KRISTIN RUSSO: Yeah, he did a lot of pluralizing of things and like, adding Ss to the ends and changing the form of words for comedy and just to kinda create—not his own language, but one step maybe below that.
HZ: That’s pretty smart, isn’t it? Take something familiar and just modify it enough that it seems particular to this.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Yeah. Which I feel is what— I remember being in high school and playing with words like that as well, sort of hearing it done to some other word and then taking that and applying it to something else. And that was my experience growing up, so I’m sure that it happens when you’re of an age where you’re familiar with your language enough to play with it.
HZ: I think it’s a very human impulse, isn’t it, to get creative with it. You’ve got a lot of opportunities, since you have to use it all the time. Do you think that his original phrase was “gives me the Whedons”?
KRISTIN RUSSO: We can change it to that now.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: This kinda connects nicely to a similar email from Emma, who wrote in to say, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer is credited as being the first time ‘google’ was used as a verb when, in Season 7 Episode 4, Willow asked Buffy, ‘Have you googled her yet?’ I’d love to hear your thoughts on pop culture verbifying nouns into actions.”
HZ: Well, that’s a human thing, again, this is a form of language play that is—people get so pissed off about it and they think it’s newfangled. But it’s been going on for as long as English language has been going on. So I don’t think that’s unusual. I think the truth of it wasn’t that this was the first time Google had ever been used as a verb, but it may have been the first time Google was used as a verb on television, because this was 2002, and I think it had already been used as a verb by 2000. But Google were really pissed off about being used as a verb. And you would think most brands would be pretty thrilled to get to be the generic term for something, because it does mean that they have wiped the floor with the competition and even if the company dies, for whatever reason, they can be remembered. But they did this blog post in 2006, with lawyers saying which ways were acceptable to use the word Google and which weren’t. So it was basically a passive aggressive request for people not to use it as a verb, because they only wanted you to say google if you actually meant using Google. What sadsacks!
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Boo. Shut up, Google.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Imagine Kleenex was like, “Um, could you actually only call our tissues Kleenex?” What would the basis be of - if you’re popularized that much, how could that be bad? Weird.
HZ: Yeah, well, it’d be terrible for the other manufacturers for tissues. But not for Kleenex. KRISTIN RUSSO: Right, like if some other brand of tissue was like, “Actually, you cannot use Kleenex to describe our tissues” that would make sense. But wow, that’s fascinating.
HZ: You can’t control these things. Once they’re out, people are going to use it how they want. And your blog post is not going to change that. Also, the word ‘google’ as a verb had been around, actually, since the early 20th century as a cricket term. Which I’m sure you are all well across of.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Oh, yeah, of course. What does it mean in cricket?
HZ: Oh, I don’t give a shit. Some kind of ball thing, from a googly shot. I grew up with a lot of cricket in the house and I refuse to understand what a googly actually is. It’s my form of rebelling against my childhood.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Let’s take a little detour over to Faith, because I wanna know what you think about this, but so did Bridget from South London, who asked: “What is Helen’s take on Faith’s catchphrase ‘5x5’?” We’ve done a lot of talking about this in the podcast space, so what do you think, Helen?
HZ: Oh, have you covered where it’s from?
KRISTIN RUSSO: We’ve covered various places where it might be from, but then the one I think we landed the most—that stuck the most—was, like, truckers, over the radio? Right? Was that where we landed, Jenny?
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Or did it have something to do with sailing? Helen, help us!
KRISTIN RUSSO: See, so this is kinda where we live with it.
HZ: Yeah. It is a radio communications thing, apparently from the US military in the 1940s, and the five-point scale they had for clarity and signal strength. So 5x5 was top notch for both those things, so it just means, “I understand you perfectly.” Fine. My take is, where did late-1990s teen Faith get hold of this?
KRISTIN RUSSO: Faith’s story could have easily included hitchhiking and grabbing rides with truckers. Can’t you see Faith getting down to Sunnydale?
HZ: That’s true, or maybe she spent a lot of time in childhood with World War 2 vets. Or she watched Aliens a lot, apparently they use it in Aliens.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Yeah, they do use it in Aliens.
HZ: And Alias. I don’t think this show is too bad for it, but a lot of teen dramas, you’re just so conscious that the writers are 30+ years older than the characters and have not taken account of that. And maybe it would be more embarrassing if they were trying to be, “How’re you doing, fellow kids?” But you could maybe hire some young writers, or do what Clueless did, which is, like, invent a whole system of convincing-sounding slang that isn’t real and therefore it doesn’t get embarrassing. But it’s like in the Gilmore Girls, where Rory Gilmore has no references from art or media of her lifetime. With Faith, I don’t think it’s as bad as that, but it still seems tenuous to me.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Yeah. Faith is somebody who specifically comes in with a different set of words, from like, her background and where she’s coming from, and seems to play with them a lot as well.
HZ: But she’s not explicitly a time traveler or anything. She’s not done a Quantum Leap.
KRISTIN RUSSO: She’s not. She’s really not.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Not that we’re aware of.
KRISTIN RUSSO: And you made me think of the creator of My So-Called Life, when you were talking about that, who I remember reading a lot about how she sat and talked with them constantly - and the cast was notably mostly, like, 14, 15, were actually young high school students. And so, that show, to me, at least, stands apart as one where the way they talk was exactly how I talked when I was in high school in the 1990s.
HZ: Yes. Agreed. I think that was the first time that I was really conscious of people saying “like” in the way that now, I use it all the time.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Oh yeah.
HZ: But I guess on TV, before, it just wasn’t really written like people actually speak.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Let’s go to Kavi’s question. Kavi wrote in from California. And this goes back to the beginning of the show: “Why does Giles’s book from Episode 1 have ‘Vampyre’ spelled like that?” I hope that I communicated the spelling to you by my pronunciation, listeners. “Is that like an older spelling of vampire? Is it just dramatic flair? I don’t think I’ve ever questioned it before, but now I’m dying to know.”
HZ: Oh, please don’t die. Vampyre with a Y was pretty interchangeable with vampire with an I when it first landed in English. Actually, I think the first appearance in English was with a Y. We probably got it from French or German, but it was based on - it’s a little unclear, but it was based on Hungarian, possibly, or Slavic languages. And it was because, at the time, they were doing a lot of coverage of the Serbian vampire epidemic of 1725 to 1732.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Oh, of course.
HZ: Apparently there were a lot of Eastern European vampire epidemics.
KRISTIN RUSSO: What is a vampire epidemic?
HZ: I assume an epidemic of vampires. Imagine Covid, but for vampirism. And no vaccine. No masking is going to save you.
KRISTIN RUSSO: They’re like, “We have a new variant,” and Spike puts on his leather coat.
HZ: Makes people kind of sexy and nocturnal. I’d imagine they were probably dying of some blood disease, and they blamed it on vampirism. But they’d been writing about vampire-like creatures in English for hundreds of years before that, so the concept wasn’t new. They just didn’t really have the word in writing. Maybe it was too powerful to put in writing, I don’t know. But when it did appear in writing, it wasn’t that people felt the need to explain it, which suggests that people already knew what a vampire was.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Interesting.
HZ: So anyway, with the Y, I imagine that it was partly because spelling was a lot more flexible then. It wasn’t really standardized, and it had come from foreign languages. So that was another element of “Which is it? I don’t know, just go with the flow.” And then in the show, they’re just going to choose whatever looks the most arcane, aren’t they?
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Yes.
HZ: Like, they would use a long S if that was relevant, or a V instead of a U.
KRISTIN RUSSO: It’s supposed to be an old book, yeah. Okay, so this question came in from Kat, who says, “Thoughts on the recent prevalence of conlanging?” How do you say that word, Helen?
HZ: Uh. Yeah, conlanging.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Conlanging?
HZ: Conlang is short for of constructed languages.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Okay, okay, conlanging.
HZ: Languages that have been invented recently. And then conlanging is that in action.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Great. Okay, so I’m glad I stopped there, because I needed to know what that word even meant before we went further.
HZ: Very fair question.
KRISTIN RUSSO: “Thoughts on the recent prevalence of conlanging in fantasy, versus just making shit up as you need it, versus using a real human language that’s unlikely to be understood by the viewer? Going on David J. Peterson’s Wikipedia, there’s a lot of conlangs he’s made for TV and film that were only used for one line or a couple of names. And to me, that seems like an awful lot of effort.”
HZ: To you, it does. But to David J. Peterson, it is not.
KRISTIN RUSSO: “But when you use a real human language, that has its own cultural implications a lot of the time. My aforementioned ling slash con/sci partner thinks that TV writers should use Icelandic a lot more, because it sounds very unusual to English speakers without running into the problem of, quote, “Let’s use Arabic because it sounds harsh and exotic,” end quote, et cetera. And when you just make things up, you run the risk of them sounding very silly.” Wow, Kat.
HZ: Well, you just made the case, Kat, that when you just make things up, you run the risk of them sounding very silly, which is why people hire conlangers like David J. Peterson to make up something that sounds like a plausible effort. Because you say it’s a lot of effort, but it’s so much more effort for actors to have to extemporize some realistic-sounding fictional language and then for that to be consistent with what the other actors are doing. I think that’s how Klingon started, and then they needed more of it for the show. So then they brought in Marc Okrand to develop it, based on what the actors had done. But it was quite challenging for the actors to have to deal with it, before that. So David J. Peterson has constructed languages for lots of fiction. He came on The Allusionist a few years ago to talk about making Dothraki and Valyrian for Game of Thrones.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Woo-woo!
KRISTIN RUSSO: Cool.
HZ: We were talking about how much history he constructs for the language, because you have to take into account a lot of things, like the geography of a place, how that might have influenced the kinds of words people need or the kind of sounds they make. And then, just all these mistakes that are in language: it’s not consistent at all, like English is full of all these idiosyncrasies that don’t really make sense. And he has to come up with that, so that the language isn’t unrealistically perfect. It’s just incredible how much stuff you have to think about. So probably, if in Kat’s example, he’s only had to come up with one or two lines, he’s not gonna figure out thousands of words for it and a whole grammatical system and a whole writing system and a whole etymology. But he said that in Game of Thrones’ case, the producers had tried to make up some for the auditions, and they were really disappointed with how silly it sounded.
And if you’re spending millions on production and on a set and costumes and stuff, and you’re inventing a world, it’s so cheap to hire someone who constructs languages. Because people are really sensitive to this stuff if it sounds unreal. And some people get so into it, as well, that they then want to learn it, and if it doesn’t work, they’re like, “Wait a minute!” But I would say about Icelandic: I don’t think Icelandic is the solution at all. I think maybe your partner in linguistics chose it because it’s spoken mostly by white people, so that’s why they thought it doesn’t have the problems of [choosing] Arabic, and there’s only 300,000 Icelandic speakers, and they have a pretty good standard of living so they’re not discriminated against like other speakers of other languages might be. But Icelandic is an endangered language. And maybe it doesn’t want whatever associations it would get from the fictional universe it’s being poured into. Like you say, it wouldn’t have the same problems as using Arabic; but no language is neutral.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Very interesting.
HZ: And then some people will recognize it, because it is similar to Scandinavian languages, and there’s quite a lot of that in English as well. So maybe it wouldn’t sound foreign enough. Maybe this is why they use Latin so much, actually, because you’re not offending ancient Romans now, because they’re dead.
KRISTIN RUSSO: I guess I just never—like, I didn’t know Klingon. I didn’t know about the existence of Klingon. Even when I knew the word Klingon, I didn’t know until very recently that it was an actual language that was created by someone. Which I find fascinating.
HZ: So many people learned it, that it had a life outside of the show. That was another thing David J. Peterson was a bit disappointed by. He hoped people would do that with the languages he made for Game of Thrones, but he said they didn’t, really. It might have been be cause the audience was a bit older and a lot of kids liked learning Klingon.
KRISTIN RUSSO: But also, you can’t really know what the lifespan of it will be.
HZ: That’s true.
KRISTIN RUSSO: You know, even if that isn’t a thing right now, I feel like fandoms especially evolve over time. So it could have its time.
HZ: That is very true.
KRISTIN RUSSO: David J. Peterson, don’t get sad, okay? You might have your time.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Anything could happen.
HZ: I think he’s alright. I think he may have just done the language for Dune, or something like that.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Oh, wow.
HZ: He’s a very busy language constructor. I’m happy for him.
KRISTIN RUSSO: What an amazingly fascinating job.
HZ: Yes. I think also you don’t get into it expecting it to become a job. He’s constructed 50-odd languages. And I think the ones for Game of Thrones were maybe his 17th.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Wow.
HZ: Some people just love doing this.
KRISTIN RUSSO: I can understand why.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: It’s cool.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Like, I couldn’t do it myself, but it does sound so fascinating and satisfying to me.
HZ: Did you see the Netflix film The Christmas Chronicles, where Kurt Russell plays Santa, that came out a couple years ago? Apparently, he invented Yulish for that, the language of Santa Claus and the elves.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Okay, well. I’ll be watching that now. Yulish. What a fantastic name for the language.
HZ: He did stuff in Thor and Doctor Strange, Lovecraft Country, The Witcher.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Yes!
KRISTIN RUSSO: So is he just the only guy out there making languages or what?
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Well, you do Game of Thrones, I feel like you’re probably the first call for everybody else.
HZ: There’s lots of people who love doing it, but I don’t know how many of them get to do it for money and television.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Right. David J. Peterson, just taking all the language work out there.
HZ: I have a couple of questions for you, actually. I wouldn’t have said I was watching this in a particularly linguistically-observant way. I was just trying to get a little grounding in what you’ve been studying for the last several years. I do have two other tiny questions for you though, based on British-isms I noticed in the ones I did watch. Spike says the word “git,” which is not a word I’ve ever heard an American say.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Oh.
HZ: It’s like a—
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: What does it mean?
HZ: It’s just an insult. It’s like a—
KRISTIN RUSSO: Like a fool?
HZ: A not so swear-y that you’d have to remove it insult. They probably say it in Harry Potter.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Gotcha.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Yeah, I feel like I’ve heard that before, enough to be like, “You’re saying something not nice.” That’s all it does to my brain.
HZ: It’s a little retro. I’m not sure whether the children of today are saying it. But you could probably get it into a show aimed at them, without censorship.
KRISTIN RUSSO: If you’re a child listening to this, please, do your job and bring “git” back, okay?
HZ: And the other thing was: in the pilot, Giles mentions Bovril - a product as far as I know not marketed in the US - which is a jar of beef extract.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: What does he say about it? That slid right past us.
HZ: Well, he just says that he’d rather be at home with a cup of Bovril.
KRISTIN RUSSO: A cup?!
HZ: Because people dilute it and drink it, hot.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Like broth?
HZ: It’s thicker, it’s more viscous than broth.
KRISTIN RUSSO: I don’t understand what it is.
HZ: I'll just cut in to explain: Bovril is a thick, very dark brown ooze that is intensely salty and savoury, and it comes in small round bulb-shaped jars with red lids.
Its original name was Johnston's Fluid Beef, after its inventor, John Lawston Johnston, who was a Scottish butcher, living in Canada, who in 1871 won a contract to supply canned beef products to Napoleon III’s armies during the Franco-Prussian War. Now what’s more cannable, portable, shelf-stable and quick to prepare than solid beef? Why, liquid beef! Johnston’s Fluid Beef was born, and as a teenager renamed Bovril; and it was a huge hit. Victorians loved swigging that beef. Armies, strongmen, the Pope, and Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic team were on the beef.
There was for a while a horse version, Chevril - portmanteau! I’ll get to the name ‘Bovril’ in a moment. But the reason it caught my attention is that Bovril is not easily available in the US, there are import restrictions on the product; so it was surprising to me that in the late 1990s Bovril was sneaked into the pilot of this very American show. Would any viewer in the USA have got the reference?
KRISTIN RUSSO: No. But maybe somebody in the writers’ room felt like I’m feeling right now. Like, kind of horrified and fascinated and, like, just learned about it so wanted to pop it in the script.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: It’s Joss. He’s an Anglophile. It’s his favorite thing, to wedge little bits of this stuff in.
HZ: He waltzes into the writers’ room with a flask full of hot beef drink.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Wait. No one has answered my question about what they have extracted from the cow? You can’t just say it’s a cow extract. Is it, like, skin?
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: It’s none of your business, Kristin.
KRISTIN RUSSO: I don’t understand.
HZ: It’s honestly better not to know.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Is it blood? Is it, like…
HZ: I think it’s like, whatever is left over from the full cow, they condense into a dark brown gloop and put it in a jar.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Noooo.
HZ: You can spread it on some toast or you can beef up a chili or something—
KRISTIN RUSSO: No! What is with everyone and toast?
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Toast? “Beef up your chili,” okay.
HZ: It is basically an instant beef tea because that was what they were always feeding to people, beef tea.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Okay, beef tea…
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Instant. Beef. Tea.
KRISTIN RUSSO: To me, it just sounds like if you have a chicken and you have the chicken carcass, you throw it in some water and you cook it for a long time and then you get broth. So they’re just doing that, but with the cow? Kind of? A little bit?
HZ: It’s much more intense, Kristin. It’s much more intense.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Alright, alright, I’ll let it go. I’ll let it go.
HZ: In about 2004, they took the beef out of Bovril and it was briefly vegetarian. And then a couple years later, they beefed it again.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Wow, the re-beefening.
HZ: They re-beefed.
KRISTIN RUSSO: You know what, I’m just gonna stop asking questions.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Electric Beef-aloo.
KRISTIN RUSSO: It’s clear to me that I need to stop asking questions.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Yes.
HZ: Kristin didn’t ask, nonetheless I must talk about the etymology of Bovril. The ‘Bov’ is like ‘bovine’, from the Latin for cow; the ‘vril’ is from science fiction, from Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1871 hit novel The Coming Race, wherein a superior race the Vril-ya derive strength, nourishment and healing from a fluid called vril. So Bovril means bovine power fluid.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Wow!
HZ: So it’s like, beefy life force.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Okay, so when I said what were they sucking out of the cow, you actually had the answer the whole time.
HZ: It’s the cow’s soul in the jar. Oh my god.
KRISTIN RUSSO: Oh, shit!
The Allusionist is an independent podcast and guess what, so is Buffering the Vampire Slayer, and they are currently hurtling towards their grand finale having recapped nearly the entirely of seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer AND Jenny has written and performed a song for every single episode of the TV show. They said it couldn’t be done! You can hear the show and their songs and buy tickets for their upcoming live or livestreamed finale performances in New York City at BufferingTheVampireSlayer.com. This episode was originally produced by Kristin Russo for Buffering the Vampire Slayer, and there’s actually MORE of it if you want, you can hear the full version in their podfeed by searching for “Welcome to the Helenmouth”.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
grilse, noun: a salmon that has returned to fresh water after a single winter at sea.
Try using ‘grilse’ in an email today.
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