74: Autumn Leaves & Swearing

Oh, god damn it. I can't hear you. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. I'm wearing these headphones that are like my sleep once I sleep in. And if you touch them in a certain way, it just turns white noise on. I'm so glad I'm not doing the topic this episode because I swear to god, if I just see you slowly put one hand up to the ear.

Hello, and welcome to Let's Learn Everything, the show where we learn anything and everything. Interesting. Today, we're going to be learning about a science topic and a miscellaneous topic as hell. Oh, did not think that pitch through. My name is Tom. Today, I will be joining our listeners as the student of the episode, and I'm very excited.

My name is Caroline and today's science topic is why do leaves change their color in autumn? Oh, what a good, you know what? This is great because sometimes you just have questions where I will, I'll set the scene in a second about why I picked this as a topic, but yeah, it's just because I will.

Well, I'm curious about is like, I feel like there's like an answer you can say in a sentence. Yeah, I feel. And I'm very curious how this can be a full topic. How this ended up being a many-page script. It's just a sentence. Yeah. And I'm curious where this will lead us. OK, $10 on colonialism somehow, because I feel like I feel like this can get into there. I don't have taken it in that direction. And I didn't this time. But you know what, maybe it'll come up in conversation. Fascinated. Yeah.

My name is Ella and today's miscellaneous topic is it's swearing. Oh my god.

Ela has told us so much about how she is working on this topic and how long it is. And now I know why that is the case. Wow. Nobody's allowed to complain about if there are swear words in this episode, though, because we're warning you off the bat. Crystal clear. I have a disclaimer for the start of the topic. Nice. Brilliant. I'm so excited. Could you imagine trying to get through that whole topic without swearing at all? That would be delightful too.

And so this is where we get to the origins of the word freak. Heck. Poop. Also, before we start the episode, before we start a recording, Ella told us some fun news about friends of the show.

Oh yeah, so Kelly and Zach Greener-Smith, who have been on to talk about their book, well their book won the Royal Society's book prize. Holy frick! No heckin' way! Did you just say no heckin' way, boob? I said poop! I was like, it was so rude because I was like what do you mean?

Yeah, they won £25,000. Oh, well done. Hey, what? I don't know if it'll win this, but we could try. Well done, guys. Yeah, nice to them. Very, very well deserved and obviously couldn't have done it without us, so.

You're welcome. Nice. Nice. So, this episode's science topic is a question. It is, why do leaves change colour in the autumn? I want to set the seat. Oh, I've got my hands up.

She's another teacher. Hands down because I'm going to set the scene about why I picked this topic and then I will ask the question about what your thoughts are.

I recently went to a show called An Evening of Unnecessary Detail, which is where literally a bunch of smart people come and talk about whatever topic they want in an unnecessary amount of detail for nine minutes. That's so fun. A friend of mine was one of the people on this lineup, and this friend of mine, Jin, did a topic all about why chili peppers are hot.

And I was a bit like, right, really good question. But in my head, I was like, the answers just kept saying, right? Like really easy answered the question, but they just kept asking why. And I was like, absolutely obsessed with the format. So they were like, but why would it be spicy to deter like mammals from eating it? But why would you want to deter mammals from eating fruits?

Because human stomachs, their stomach acid is too strong to, it then dissolves the chili seeds, right? And that's why the leaves change colors so that people think they're spicy. No. And leaves are bad for my stomach. I've tried. Oh, no.

That's so good Caroline. It was super interesting and it ended up being just a round out. The reason why chilies are spicy is that to some animals, they're not spicy. So for like bird species whose stomach acid isn't as strong as ours, it won't break down their chili seeds. So the birds will go and poop the seeds somewhere else. Whereas if we were to eat them, we wouldn't poop the seeds out. Oh, that's so interesting.

The plants are mainly spicy to animals who wouldn't be helpful to it. It's super interesting, right? But this format had me thinking, is there a topic that I can go into an unnecessary amount of detail?

And then I did the classic thing that we all do when we're trying to think of a topic and we can't look outside the window and I was like, yes. Autumn leaves sick. I can do that. So that is why we are here. Are you ready to learn more about leaves than you ever have done in your life before?

Yes, please. I also, I'm really hoping that somehow by the end of this week, we end up like all the way at the Big Bang or something. But I am genuinely very, I'm looking forward to walking around my neighborhood and being like, wow, the leaves, amazing. All right, lads, why are leaves green to start off with? Chlorophyll. Yeah.

So yeah, for those of you who don't know, they have a green pigment in them. It's as simple as that. They're full of chloroplasts, which are the organelle inside a leaf called organelle because they're small little things that do things inside of cells, like your organs do things inside of you.

And the thing that these organelles do is photosynthesize. That's their job. That's what they're up to. And chlorophyll, as Ella just mentioned, is the pigment inside chloroplasts that make them look green. In fact, chlorophyll literally means green leaf in Greek, which is cute.

So during the growing season, chlorophyll is continually being produced and broken down and produced and broken down in the leaf over and over again, which is what makes it appear green. Even more detail, chlorophyll molecules are actually really similar to the heme group that carries oxygen in our blood. What? Well, so instead of having iron at the center, it has magnesium. I have got a little diagram that might be helpful. Holy fucking shit. What?

Oh, okay. Wow. Caroline sent us a picture that has the like molecule diagram for heme in blood and chlorophyll. And yeah, they look really similar. They both form the sort of like ring shape and smack dab in the center of that ring for heme. It's iron and in its place for chlorophyll, it's magnesium. It's super. I don't know. I think that's beautiful.

It's nice, isn't it? That is an amount of detail that I won't go into, but what I will say is that in the same way that the structure of the heme group makes it look red because of that iron in it, the structure of chlorophyll with that magnesium in the middle of it makes it appear green to us. It's reflecting green light.

Are you fucking kidding me? It's as simple as that. It's really, really easy. That's nuts. It's as simple as that. That's fucking... It's not nuts, is it? It's not nuts. It's just... I just... Because most explanations stop at chlorophyll is green, leaves are green.

When you say the core of the chlorophyll is instead of iron, it's magnesium. And now we're talking about how like different molecular structures, different elements will reflect and absorb different colors of light. This is, I don't know, it's so cool. It's like, it's like switching out the, it's so nerdy. It's like switching out the Kyber crystal inside a lightsaber and then it makes the lightsaber turn into different colors. I don't know, it's, it's just so cool.

And to be clear, there is a little, it's not demonstrated super clearly in this diagram, but there is a long chain on the chlorophyll. That's what C20 is. So it is like that structure is then in the way that the structure of a heme group makes it reflect red light. So it appears red to us. The structure of the chlorophyll reflects green light and that makes it appear green to us.

Very good. I think that's fucking, I think this diagram should be shown so early in science classes. I think there's rules that like the atomic structure changes the colors. I love that. I love that. I'm so happy. Tom loves this so much. You get a bonus point for enthusiasm because I like it.

Oh, well. So yeah, so chlorophyll will reflect green light. It absorbs the rest of the visible light spectrum and that allows it to use light and carbon dioxide to make sugars and oxygen. That's a very quick overview of the photosynthesis process. I can roll. So why do leaves change their color from green to orange and red and autumn? Holy shit. You know what? No, I had an answer and I just think it's completely long. I was like, well, they just stop photosynthesizing.

Well, yeah. Yeah, you're pretty much spot on there. Yeah. I feel like in my mind, oh, I'm wrong. I feel like in my mind, like, in my mind, like, in my mind, the pigment like drains out of belief somehow. I know that's not right. It's not like green, like drips out of the leaf or something like that. But that I mean,

kind of also along the right lines here, you both are. So in autumn, trees start losing their leaves in the preparation for winter periods. So part of the process of losing their leaves is shutting down photosynthesis. And then the tree itself reclaims a lot of the valuable chemicals and nutrients that are in those leaves.

Whoa, it's like hibernating. Yeah, right. I'm stupid. I know a lot of people know this. I like that. That's cool. I don't know. I didn't know this, particularly. I guess that when trees go, when it's deciduous trees, when it goes to winter, they would stop photosinsizing because there's like light, I assume.

Absolutely, there are two things that trigger this process. It's a reduction of the amount of daylight and also a drop in temperature. And the dropping temperature is really important. As I mentioned earlier, chlorophyll is constantly being made and broken down, made and broken down. And that's a chemical reaction. And as the temperatures get colder, chemical reactions are happening slower. Holy fucking shit. That's so interesting.

Well, then maybe you don't have this in your script, then, but why is it that evergreen trees can continue to work when it's colder? I do have this in my script, actually. Yeah. No fucking way. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not necessarily that they work.

Well, during the winter periods, they are still going to be photosynthesizing slower. But the whole thing with deciduous trees and losing their leaves is that the leaves are not going to be able to survive over winter. So it would be costly to try and keep those leaves and hold onto them over that period.

Okay. So the deciduous strategy is like instead of having like leaves all year round, have disposable super high efficiency leaves that only work during the summer. But they're so efficient that it's worth losing them. Yeah. It's like having a solar panel that's extremely efficient, but super delicate. And then evergreen trees just have them all year round.

Well, so with Evergreen leaves, a lot of their leaves are really waxy, which protects them from cold temperatures, but also makes them more costly to the tree to produce. So there's a bit more of a reason why they would want to hold on to those leaves for as long as possible, because it's a bigger cost to the tree. And not to the tree. Make new ones. OK. Oh.

Trees are so actually quite cool, and they do cool stuff, and we just look at them, and that's a tree. I know that's half of the reason this is so mind-blowing is like, they're everywhere. I've never thought I've never been like... What I really enjoy about this is like Tom's like grasping his forehead at the concept of trees.

The chemical reaction is slower because that's what photosynthesis is a chemical reaction, so it triggers that wow. Photosynthesis is a chemical reaction, it's going to get slower. Chlorophyll being produced and broken down is a chemical reaction, so that happens slower.

So there's less chlorophyll being produced in the leaves. So Tom, you said that the pigment drains out. It's just that the pigment isn't being replaced as quickly. And at some point, it's not being replaced at all anymore. Right. So that's also what's happening. There's a plant next to me and it's leaves are turning yellow and it's like that plant is just not replacing it because

Oh, yeah. So I guess when all plants die, yeah, like if you give them no light, they will turn brown because they're not. This is slowing down and it's triggering the whole process. Yeah. It's active work to turn green. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. It is more complicated than that, but this is a way that I'm explaining it that makes sense to me. That's also more deep than most explanations of this. I have got a paper that fully explains the process of chlorophyll being broken down. I could barely understand it, but it's there available to you if you want to read it and try and understand it more. Try those, baby. That's what that's for.

So that's why the green pigment is going. But what about the process that actually leads to orange and yellow colors coming through? What do you think that's all about? Oh, so that's not just a less magnesium means less absorption of those colors or something. Yeah, I just, I thought yellow and red were just the default without chlorophyll.

So here's the thing about chloroplasts. They don't just have the green pigment chlorophyll in them.

They have other pigments in them as well that aren't usually visible when there's lots of green chlorophyll in there. So have either of you ever heard of carotenoids before? No. I feel like we've mentioned the word on the podcast before, but I can't recall. I've definitely talked about them on TikTok before. I'll give you one guess about what colour you think a carotenoid pigment might be. Oh, it's orange. Oh, are they the colour of carrots? Yeah.

That's the one. So it's the pigment found in carrots, bananas, pumpkins, egg yolks, human skin. If you get carotenemia, the list goes on. Sorry, carotenemia is when you eat too many carrots and your skin starts to go orange. Yeah, so if you'd like an unnecessary amount of detail with that one, you have to eat 10 carrots a day for several weeks in order to get carotenemia. That's less than I thought. It's less than I thought, 10 a day for a few weeks.

I can do that challenge accepted. I've just shared a little link. If you click on the link and scroll down, you can see what carotenemia looks like in a person's hands on a white person's hand. The new craze sweeping teens across the nation.

I saw a TikTok and it was like, you know, if you eat lots and lots of carrots, you can get a really natural tan and then you look at these pictures and it's like, you're glowing yellow, don't do that. I will say the picture of the person's hands with Karate and you mate, it looks a lot like, I would say, if you have liver, like dizziness in your game. Yes, it does look like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, sidetrack completed, back to leaves. So,

That bright yellow orange colour, that carotenoid, is always present in the leaves, but it only becomes visible when the chlorophyll begins to, like, reduce. It becomes a bit colourless. That green pigment is going. So it can start to stick out more.

So, the colour change is because the leaf is going to die, it stops wasting energy making chlorophyll, and carotenoids are more visible. What do carotenoids do? Well, so this is the thing. Oh my god, I'm loving this, because often when we write a script for a topic, you just have what you have, and you might have thought some of the questions they're coming up with, but not all of them, so you just have to go, I'm not, I'm sorry, I don't know. Every single thing I'm asking you, you're like, I know, because I've looked at this in necessary detail.

This is like when you in a video game, when you like go into a building and you open the door and you're like, wait, I can open all of these doors. You build something for each of these doors. And this was the joy of researching a topic like this in this way is that every time I had one of these questions, I was just like, well, I've got to go and find out about it now, basically. And it all leads us through this journey. So it wasn't that long ago, maybe like,

I say not long ago, relative to science existing like 1900s, the consensus was that this was all the reason why autumn leaf colors were what they were, and that it didn't really serve any function. It's just like their background color. That's just part of the process of the leaf dying is what it is.

There is another pigment, though, that I've not mentioned yet to you guys. It's a pigment that is not unmasked, but is actively being made when leaves start changing their color. Because there's a color I've not talked about yet, which is the red color or the leaves. Yeah. Holy shit. Good point. Yeah. Thank you.

You are going to say what carotene does eventually though, right? Yes, I will talk about what is colour. So, that final pigment that I want to talk about is something called anthocyanin. These aren't always present in the chloropastids of the leaf. They're usually synthesised after the onset of autumn, specifically from sugars inside the cell sap.

So these are a rag pigment. They're found in cherries, apple skins, things like that. So what happens is whilst these warm sunny days in autumn are still happening, the anthocyanins are being produced. There's a lot of sugar being produced. So there's more red, but autumns really, really cold nights are still causing all of the other issues that we've previously spoken about. It also causes like the leaf veins to constrict.

A little bit, which means that the red colour doesn't always go all over the leaf, which is why you get some of that like splotchy red colour happening. Just because it's like, it's just so chilly out. Yeah, it's just so chilly. In the same way that veins will vasoconstrict and be like, oh, your fingers are going to get really cold and it's going to be awful. The leaf is like, oh, yeah, I'm going to hold all of that in. So that, yeah, that's the like general idea of why anthocyan is being produced.

They're being produced because they're still making, because the plant is still making sugar. There's still some sugar being produced there. But the big question that I have is, if a leaf is dying, why would it not waste energy making more chlorophyll, but then start making a new pigment as well?

Right? Very good question. Yeah, why not just just drop immediately if you're gonna- Yeah, totally. Why not absorb all of those nutrients, get all of that stuff back into the branch, and then just like cut your losses and go? Yeah, yeah, exactly. There is growing evidence that the colours have clear functions, which assist the plant not just during autumn, but also maybe going into the next growing season as well. Okay.

Are you can I have a guess? Yes, I was about to ask. Do you think what do you think the benefits might be? Could it be that the leaves when they fall on the ground have an advantage of being a certain color? No. So leaves when they hit the ground, when they turn that brownie color, that is when there are more tannins being produced. So at that point, that is like the leaf is done so. And whilst the leaf does have benefits when it hits the ground,

I was gonna say, can it be mulch? Well, yeah, it becomes like the ground of the forest. It does release some nutrients into the forest ground, provides habitat for loads of wildlife. It does then eventually feed back into the tree again in that way. Yeah, like drinking your own piss. Yeah, you know, why wouldn't you?

But that is not a benefit whilst it's still attached to the tree. So yeah, what do you think might be the benefits of the leaf still being attached to the tree? I have no idea. Well, both part of the answer. Do you want to develop that thought a little bit further?

No, this is a lateral stop making me do thinking. Because I'm like, obviously my brain goes to like getting rid of predators or attracting helpful animals. Absolutely spot on. Well, let's change it. What other things in the natural kingdom do we know that are brightly colored? Maybe like reds, yellows, not just trees, butterflies, caterpillars, definitely. Yes.

Okay. Why would a caterpillar want to be brightly colored? To ward off predators. Yeah, to ward off predators, absolutely. Other animals like caterpillars, poison dart frogs are also brightly colored. It's a form of a posomatism or an aposomatic thing, literally trying to deter predators from eating that caterpillar or whatever.

The idea is that a brightly colored insect frog, maybe a leaf in this example, looks like it might be poisonous to those animals. Whether it is or not actually, it's a bright enough color that makes it think it's dangerous so that bird or whatever is deterred from eating it.

The idea is that it's exactly the same in leaves that are orange and red especially. Really? Yeah, right. So insects like aphids that use the tree as a host over winter will be deterred from sitting on the tree eating those leaves and then existing on the tree afterwards. So I guess, huh, because not all trees get red leaves, right? So I'm just going straight to yellow and I guess those are trees that don't have like a predator-ish problem then.

Well, yeah, so it's either they have less of a predator problem or with some domesticated species. They also don't have that red color. So especially like domesticated apple trees often don't have that yellow red response. I know it's so silly, isn't it? That's also there's a real big difference between like North America and parts of Europe about what color the leaves go. And that's often attributed to the ice age and about what tree species survived after.

The words basically. Okay. That was a whole thing that I'm not going to go into. Okay. Wow. There are so many. You could have tasted. There's so many ways that this can go. Okay. That makes a lot more sense because I think maybe Ellie, you also had the thing where I was like, I was imagining like birds trying to like eat this tree apart and they see the other like, no. Why would I?

Then when you say aphids like taking root in them, I'm like, oh, that makes that does make a bit more sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just this is like a theory, right? Like obviously there's no like super clear reason necessarily. That's a theme that we will visit quite a few times in this. Yeah. So is it the red and the yellow that do that? It's a carotene as well.

So it is red and yellow, but it's more pronounced in red. And actually there are some examples of, so there was a 2012 study that found that simulating insect herbivory, so leaf eating damage on maple trees. These trees then showed earlier red coloration than trees that weren't damaged. So it's actually a direct response is that they will start making more of this red pigment, which is really, really cool.

Fascinating. Yeah. There's also something about egg laying on these trees as well. So if the tree looks like it might be dangerous to aphids, then they might be less likely to lay eggs on there, which will then not overwinter and won't hatch on the tree the following year either. So it's not just the immediate, the aphid might grow into the tree now. It's actually like in the next cycle, those eggs aren't going to be laid either, which is really interesting.

Whilst it's a super interesting theory, there is one guy who got really, really heated about this. Simcha, Levy Adam, got really, really heated about this sort of stuff. And I absolutely love this quote. Oh boy. He said, I stress that when I deal with a multifunctional character, such as yellow and red autumn leaf coloration, I fully agree with Endler in his 1981 study, who commented concerning the functions of animal coloration. We must be careful.

not to assume that because we have found one apparent function of a color pattern, it necessarily means that we have a complete explanation. Unfortunately, some scientists who study autumn leaf coloration stick to a single explanation and ignore clear evidence of simultaneous operation of other mechanisms.

Which is well, I want to say if Caroline, if you had read that in like a flat tone of voice, it wouldn't have been nearly as steaming as it came across. No, no, let's say saying other scientists ignoring clear evidence, like, come on. That was pretty when I read that quote, that was the tone that I read it in. So I had to share it. And that's how they wanted it to be read, I'm sure.

You can even hear that. You can hear that research typing furiously. I love that being like, these leaves live full rich lives. How dare you? I will say about this researcher is that, so this paper was released in 2022. It's called the phenomenon of red and yellow autumn leaves, hypotheses, agreements and disagreements. This thing is like 20 chapters long. Wow.

huge paper that sounds like a really that sounds like such a read when you're researching like this and something like that comes up. Yeah, you find the gold line like that. Yeah, even though I take the mic a little bit. Yeah, this it was a banging paper.

And I think I kind of agree with them that like you can't hear. Oh yeah, absolutely. Whilst that is something that might apply to some other species, and it might be one face of the answer, you can't ignore other things. And this researcher talked about how it like there's waves of research when it comes to leaf coloration, which is so funny to me that like leaf coloration would have ideas of thinking and superseded theories and stuff like that. It just makes me so happy.

It's like in the 60s, there was a big orange wave and then they weren't jumped on the green bandwagon. So another reason, which came up a few times when I was researching this topic, is the idea that these red leaves might benefit plants in a different way, not sending insects away, but maybe attracting some animals in, which is one of you team mentioned this earlier.

So there are some plants with berries. And the idea is that these plants might be trying to deliberately attract birds by using a high contrast between the color of their berries and their autumnal coloration, basically. OK. So a 2002 paper found that the red orange foliage of some Canadian shrub species sort of accentuated the color of their black seeds, basically encouraging birds to come and have a look at it. It was really, really cool. Yeah.

It could also be in a similar vein undermining herbivore camouflage. So a lot of insects are a green color so that they can blend in with the leaves. If they start changing color, then all of a sudden they don't blend in very well. And again, attracting other predators to come and eat those insects. So not necessarily trying to keep insects away, but highlighting them to other animals so that they get eaten.

I love that betrayal. Here's the motherfucker. He's right here. It's so good. Absolutely. I'm having to separate in my mind that this is because of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and not because trees are really smart.

That's a great point. That's a really good point. Well, because, yeah, again, it's really important to highlight here that the whole goal for the tree isn't necessarily to keep that individual leaf alive, but to try and make sure that the tree can absorb as much of those nutrients from that leaf as possible whilst it is still producing some chlorophyll or anything like that.

So it's like one tree started to get, you know, yellow leaves and that tree happened to do better because they had yellow leaves. Yeah, exactly. And so then that got passed down through lines of trees. The tree doesn't know what effect it's having. Yeah. If it is on animals, it just knows that that means it keeps the leaf longer. Yeah, literally. I just didn't know that either because it's a tree, but you know what I mean.

But it benefits and then it's able to produce more seeds the following year. And then those genes are passed on, right? Yeah, exactly. There is one more theory that I want to talk about today, which sort of moves away from the impact of insects or birds or other species. It actually talks about light being a factor when it comes to trees being able to re-absorb all of the nutrients.

So this is called the photoprotection theory. And the idea is that anthocyanins, specifically those red pigments, protect the leaf against the harmful effects of light at lower temperatures. What?

So you would think the leaves are about to fall. Protection is not of extreme importance to the tree, but the tree, like I just mentioned, does want to reduce harm. It does want to be able to keep reabsorbing nutrients like nitrogen for as long as physically possible from those leaves.

So light does impact how leaves can absorb some of those nutrients. It actually really, really can negatively impact chlorophyll in these leaves. So there is something called photo inhibition in leaves and it can really impact plants at lower temperatures. Absorbing too much light when not so much photosynthesis going on can basically cause the leaf to get overloaded by light and it can start causing damage to it.

Right, which I had never even thought about. So all of this light's coming in, but photosynthesis isn't happening. What's the leaf gonna do? Oh, interesting. It's like a transition lenses or, you know, it's like it's closing up shop.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because the other thing is, if chlorophyll is getting damaged, then it can't get reabsorbed as efficiently by the tree. So it doesn't want chlorophyll to get damaged by all of this light, even though this leaf is already dying. It still wants to be able to get as much of that broken down chlorophyll and nitrogen as possible. Right. Interesting.

So in theory, anthocyanins, the red pigment help to protect the leaf from some of this more damaging light and allows it to more efficiently absorb chlorophyll, absorb the nutrients into the branch for reuse in the next season.

And there was a really nice study that found that red leaves had less nitrogen in them. So anthocyanin is good for the leaves in that way. So yeah, that one was the toughest theory for me to get my head around. So yeah, that's bonco. Yeah, it's crazy, right? Bonco. I've not heard that one before.

I loved it. I read the paper. That's what they said. Yeah. And Ella, you were asking about like the specific functions of carotenoids earlier. Obviously they play into a lot of the functions that we've just been talking about, you know, with like highlighting where insects are or where fruits are and things like that. They do serve a function all year round as well though, where they help leaves absorb other wavelengths of light. So obviously leaves reflect a lot of green light.

Crotonoids help absorb some of that green light, but not so much that it overwhelms the leaf, basically. I see. I see. That's a very quick overview of the functional Crotonoids all year round. How interesting. So yeah, those are the theories that I have outlined for today. There are more theories than this, but those are the ones that I could get my head around. So I'm gonna leave it there.

Caroline's going to go off and get their degree in plant science and come back in more detail than we ever thought possible. Pick a fight with that other person. I'm going to write a 23 chapter paper on it, actually, when I really compete with him. But you'd think...

For such a simple question, for a phenomenon that we have witnessed as a species for our entire existence, we would have a more solid answer, that we would know for certain what mechanisms are in place. But the reality is, we just don't know.

Going back to the same researcher. Yeah, it's crazy, right? Going back to the same researcher that we've just been talking about, he went on to say, because yellow and red autumn leaf coloration simultaneously serves several physiological and defensive functions. And because of the relative importance of these functions, changes within the time of one tree, one leaf, each cell within one autumn, within different autumns, and different ecological conditions.

considerable effort is needed in order to better understand this dynamic mosaic. Trying to look for such a simple explanation seems to be a waste of time and resources. Wonderful quote. I loved it so much. Dynamic mosaic.

Great, isn't it? Yeah. It is wild. I think because the time scale and like size scales we've talked about have been like a single cell producing energy to Ella, then talking about like the evolution of trees over hundreds of millions of years to then like seasons to then generations like it's it is intro. It does. It does. It is a dynamic mosaic.

It's wonderful, absolutely. Do you guys have time and space in your soul for a small climate change rant? Because I had to get one in there somehow. Caroline, remember when we were talking at the very start about where we thought this might go? I wanted to read this piece of paper where I wrote down here at the very start of the topic.

Tom has a piece of paper in his hand and it says, 145, this is due to climate change, which is great. I knew this was coming, Caroline. Of course. I'm guessing there's something about the fact that because

generally, temperatures are increasing, that trees dropping their leaves later, and then maybe growing the back later as well, which is like shifting things. It's not even necessarily that they're growing them back later, but it's more that the overall growing season of the tree itself is then becoming longer and longer.

So with warmer weather lasting for longer, the onset of autumn and those autumn colours is getting later each year. So yeah, it's also these autumn leaves are getting dropped a lot faster as well. So it doesn't necessarily change when the leaves grow back again, but it does mean that the tree is holding onto its leaves for a super long time. The big thing that this impacts is carbon storage. So with delayed horror film,

Would not have guessed that. Wow. Great. It's crazy. So with delayed chlorophyll degradation, this leads to the tree growing for longer, which in theory could lead to more carbon sequestration. The tree's growing for more. It's trying to photosynthesize still. It's trying to take in that carbon dioxide for as long as possible. So in theory. Hooray. Yeah. What I'm hearing is warming planet good. Well, yeah.

before we go that far. The warming planet helps with climate change. It should be noted that even though the temperatures are staying the same, photosynthesis is still taking place for a shorter amount of time per day because the days are getting shorter. So the tree has physically got less time to be able to photosynthesize in the autumn. Yeah, in the autumn. Sorry to be clear. In autumn and winter months, there's less light. It can't photosynthesize quite as much.

Gotcha gotcha gotcha. So it's not actually the best time for it to be storing carbon because it's not, there's not that much, you know, it's, it's not daytime very often. Oh, is it, so is it keeping these leaves for longer that are actually not beneficial to it? Because it's not using them to photosynthesize. It's not getting that chlorophyll out quick enough to actually, you know, to get all that energy back for winter.

And the other thing to remember is that trees are also respiring. So they're not just going through photosynthesis. They're also turning oxygen into carbon dioxide through respiration in the same way that we do. I didn't actually know that.

Wait, because I know trees turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. They also turn oxygen into carbon dioxide. Yeah. Leaves have little holes in them, basically on the underside, which allows gaseous exchange. No, I didn't know that. It's really cool. I know so much about leaves right now.

I love that for you. So, yeah, leaves do go through respiration in the same way that a lot of other living species do, but usually the rate of photosynthesis, which uses up some of that carbon dioxide, is greater than the rate of respiration, which produces carbon dioxide. It respires, it uses carbon dioxide, it takes in more carbon dioxide, it then produces oxygen. But if that ratio is changing, if less photosynthesis is happening, and more respiration is happening,

more carbon dioxide is actually getting released in the long term, basically. So does that make sense? So because they're keeping there, OK, let me see if I can get better around this. I can do it. You can do it. They're keeping the leaves longer, which means they're using energy to make.

more chlorophyll, which they need to respire to do. But they're making chlorophyll that isn't actually being put to work because it's darker, so they're not photosynthesizing. So you're getting more respiration as they need to keep on making the leaves green and less actual use of the removal of carbon dioxide. That's pretty much exactly it.

Yeah, yeah. It's like you invested energy into solar panels, a good thing, but solar panels that only came out at nighttime. So it's like net negative in the end. Yeah, yeah. But that energy is carbon dioxide, which then with no place to go goes back into the atmosphere again, causing not carbon sequestration. Okay, climate change bad. I'll write that down. Thank you. There we go.

An easier impact to visualize is the impact that autumn leaves have on animals. So a lot of animals use the color of autumn leaves as a key for migration. No fucking way. Really? Yeah, absolutely. So with the changes of autumn leaves changing color being later in the year, animals are then going to be migrating later in the year. That impacts food sources in other places as well because migrating animals aren't traveling over.

Oh no. Which is crazy. It's a huge mess. And then on top of that, it also impacts what nutrients are going back into the soil again afterwards, because the leaves are getting dropped later on in the year. It creates a whole mess. Oh no. Water use increases as well, so there's this water available in the soil. It's pretty messed up. Yeah.

I always thought of this as one of the more superficial things that happens with the climate change effect, because I've seen this. This is a very noticeable thing. It's like, oh, where are the leaves? Why is it taking you so long for the leaves to fall? Those are huge. It's a really big impact. It makes complete sense when you say it that leaves falling later would have this massive knock-on effect down the food chain and the ecosystem that they're in.

not just in the ecosystem that they're in, but ecosystems in other places as well. In other places. But until you actually said it, I had never thought of that as a possibility. I've never thought of it. Until reading a paper that outlined it, which is like mad. And especially in places like America, it feels like autumn leaves are almost a tourist attraction that people should learn about more. It's a whole thing. It's called leaf peeping. Leaf peeping. I didn't know. I don't know about that.

But even as this huge tourist industry, people still aren't learning about it. And actually, the tourist industries are also going to be affected by autumn leaves, changing colour later.

I don't care about the tourists. So yeah, I will leave it there. Overall, we don't actually know why leaves change their color. I mean, we kind of do.

changes in the level of various pigments occur due to drop temperatures in shorter days. But do we know in the level of unnecessary detail that I want to know? No, not for certain. And that infuriates me. And like Chili's, who have a clicker answer, autumn leaves do not. And I am frustrated by this.

But I would admit I'm a little bit glad because if we know everything, then what else is there to learn?

I keep thinking because it is funny because it's the same but it's different because it's like when a kid asks you why do the leaves change color, your very first answer might be like, I don't know. And then now after doing all this research, the answer is, now the answer is, we don't know.

Which is different, it is different. There's still so much we could learn about Lee's. Wait, wait for part two guys. More unfortunately.

We're just going to become a leaf podcast now. Let's learn everything about leaves. LLL. Let's learn. Yeah. So next year, guys, we're going to be changing the format a little bit. One miscellaneous leaf topic as well. What can I fold into a leaf? Why do we have a leaf covering Adam's private parts? Find out on this episode of Let's Learn Leaves.

I tell you that's actually probably quite a good question. No, we can't. We can't. Y'all, we have a wonderful jumbotron message from one of our listeners to presumably one of our other listeners. Yeah, you're right, because if it isn't to one of our listeners, how will they get it? Why have I never thought about that before? I've been like, people are just sending these into the ether.

Hey, if you want to do that too, go to let's learn everything dot com slash but this one is not going to the ether. It is going to Axel and this is from C and E and they say all caps. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Can't believe we've been friends for over a decade. Wow. We're looking forward to the wow. The wow was me editorializing by the way. That wasn't that wasn't in the message.

We're looking forward to years more of hanging out, talking about shows, playing games, and of course, listening to podcasts together.

We hope you have an awesome birthday and have some good gluten-free cicada cookies to celebrate. Oh, I love that too. Cool, but nice. I hope they're nice. Enjoy. Oh wait, maybe they're gluten-free cookies shaped like cicadas are not made of cicadas. You can have cicadas. I had a drink once that had a cicada rim where I went, what was in this? I had cricket meat once.

On a tackle, very quick, it's much meat in them. I don't want to know the answer. You make cricket mints first. Anyway, there's a whole thing. Anyway, anyway, I'll be a great day. You got some wonderful friends and try some cricket meat. Yeah.

This episode of Let's Learn Everything is brought to you by Wild Grain. As you two adventurers enter the dragon's lair, it rears back on its hind legs and bellows, tremble mortals, but I am the dragon known as... Guiled Rain! Wait, Tom, are you just, like, looking around and looking at your new Wild Grain box? For name ideas? No. Roll for initiative.

Okay, uh, Guiled goes first, and he's going to cast Frost Breath, making sure his fresh-made food stays well-preserved. Then, at his own convenience, he will use his flame breath to- So wait, he's clearly baking us from Frozen, right? Tom, you are still thinking about Wild Grain, the first bake from Frozen subscription box. Listen, if you're hungry, we can just take a break. Yeah, guys, I'm fine. We can finish this adventure. It'll be fine. Mm-hmm.

Okay, well, my armour protects me from cold, so I'm going to cast meteor swarm. That does 240 damage. Oh, wow. Okay, I forgot how high-level you all are. Wow, that was even faster than it takes to prepare a bite from wild grain, and that usually takes 25 minutes.

Tom right yep sorry okay anyway so what's our loot for defeating the dragon right yes as the dragon falls like a giant sequoia tree you see behind him a giant piling horde of treasure and as you approach it you see a mountain of fresh-baked pastas fermented brioche rolls mango and passion fruit moose all customized to guiled rains personal preferences and delivered right to your door layer dragons layer

You even spy some brand new gluten-free versions of their tortellini and even their famous sourdough breads. All right, that's quite nice. You did say that the Dragon's Keeper was gluten-free. Ella, don't encourage him. Tom, we've been doing this campaign for years. Please, just tell me. Caroline, why don't you, as the ranger of the group, why don't you give me a quick perception roll? Right, okay. 19.

Amidst the piles of delicious food options you see, a scroll! Oh my god, Tom actually has a physical scroll! I love it when DMs do this! Caroline, would you like to read what it says?

impress your guests with minimal effort this holiday season. Wildgrain is offering our listeners $30 off the first box, plus a free item in every box when you go to wildgrain.com slash Let's Learn. That's $30 off your first customized box at wildgrain.com slash Let's Learn. Or you can use promo code Let's Learn at checkout. And so, belly's full of delicious bread. Your journey at last has come to a cloned.

that was beautiful Tom thank you so Tom how have you been enjoying babble oh it's been great you know I've been trying to learn some Spanish because I was thinking of visiting Spain for like a holiday so it might be nice to hang on Ella I think we need to retake that line it's pronounced babet what

So what? Yeah, see it says right here in the ad copy, B-A-B-B-E-L, Babel. Okay, right. Tom, is Caroline alright? Yeah, so, okay, you know how Babel lets you practice actually speaking a language, right? Yeah, I mean, actually getting to speak the language is one of the best ways to learn it.

Well, unlike Babel, I think Caroline's only ever read some of these words, and I really don't have the heart to break it so that they're pronouncing it wrong. Guys, come on, let's wrap this ad up. Let's go! Right, well, with Babel's quick 10-minute lessons, I can brush up on my Spanish whenever it's convenient for me, whether that's waiting for the train or even as a challenge during lunch. And I can choose which lessons I want to do from grammar to everyday conversations.

And if I get to go to Spain, I'm really excited to go visit Gaudy's La Sagrada Familia. Oh, sorry. That's just the sound effect that plays when you pronounce a word correctly. Uh, can we get another take? I'm pretty sure it's the, say, Greyada Familia. Tom, why isn't the sound playing? Uh, nothing. There's good. You got it. You got it.

Let's just wrap it up. Let me just read the last little bit of this ad copy. No, no, no, no. Caroline, please let me do it. I really need to practice my pronunciation. Oh, OK, that sounds fair. Thank you. Here's a special holiday deal for our listeners. Right now, get up to 60% off your babble subscription, but only for our listeners at babble.com slash learn everything.

Get up to 60% off at babble.com slash learn everything. Spell B-A-B-B-E-L.com slash learn everything. Rules and restrictions may apply. Nice average, Eli and Tomb. Wait, no, that does not. You've seen our days on the podcast before. I actually fixed it in post. Don't worry about it. You'll get it straight. Somewhere in an alternate universe where Hollywood is smarter,

And the Emmy nominees for Outstanding Comedy Series are Jet Packula, Airport Marriott, Sprapple, Dear America, We've Seen You Naked, and Alla in the Family.

In our stupid viewers, you can't see any of these shows, but you can listen to them on Dead Pilots Society, the podcast that brings you hilarious comedy pilots that the networks and streamers bought but never made. Journey to the alternate television universe of Dead Pilots Society on maximumthun.org.

Oh darling, why won't you accept my love? My dear, even though you are a duke, I could never love you. You, you borrowed a book for me and never returned it. Save yourself from this terrible fate by listening to Reading Glasses. We'll help you get those borrowed books back and solve all your other reader problems. Reading glasses every Thursday on maximum fun.

Today's miscellaneous topic is swearing, cursing, profanity, obscenities, vulgarisms. Before we begin, I'm going to give a content warning. We do occasionally swear on this show, but nothing like what I am about to do.

So if you are particularly offended by curse words or you're listening with children, you're listening out loud with someone who might be offended, I would recommend just skipping this topic. Just skip it. Nice. Yeah. Bye.

Are we educating ourselves about swearing? It's true. Sometimes you just have to expose your young children to swear words because they will face them in the real world too. It's like when you catch them smoking once you make them smoke a whole stick.

I was like, say fuck a hundred times now. This might be too much exposure in one go. And wow. Is that a promise? That's a threat and a promise. Hey, folks, just want to chime in here to echo Ella's warning here that if you are sensitive to swearing or you are around children, you can skip ahead to the end of the episode, which happens at one hour, 42 minutes and 57 seconds.

You know, we won't be saying any slurs, but there are some cultural differences between the British and the US about things like the C word. So just be extra careful about where you're listening to this. So to start us off, I'd love to hear what your guys' favorite swear words or phrases are if you have any.

I really love fuck, like, it's one that I say all the time, or I thought I said it all the time, and then I said it once in front of a co-worker, and he was shocked, but I love, I feel like it just... It's versatile. Conveyes all of the things that I want it to convey. I can use it for a good thing, I can say it's fucking great, or I can go, man, that's fucking shit. And that versatility of use is a very good thing about swear words, which we will talk about at some point in this topic as well.

Tom, what about you? Tom, I'm trying to think. Fuck is good. I know this is good. I know this counts. I don't know if this would count. Maybe this is under profanity, but I do use Jesus Christ a lot. No, it definitely counts. Okay.

I feel like the phrase of it gives it a kind of a... Yeah, yeah. I really like... I do really like it, but I use it a lot less. You know what I love as well, Caroline?

I knew I wouldn't be able to do it on, but I'm practised. Ready? I love it too as well. Nice. This that I've just opened is my cunt fan and I got it during Pride this year and it's what inspired this topic. I did the same as Caroline, a classic look around. What can you see? And I saw this fan, it's his cunt on it. I was sitting on my desk and I was like,

and you looked at the fucking mirror, you know what? You know what I'm serving and I can serve to the pond. As far as words I like to say, swear words I like to say, this is my favorite because it just feels great to say. Cud feels great in the mouth, if you will.

In many ways, in many ways. You did warn us. You did warn us. I got also, got to say, as a straight guy, it's okay. I don't get to say it. You know what? That's fine. I don't feel any urge to. It doesn't bother me either. It doesn't bother me when men say it. It depends on how they're using it. It's just happening in a negative way. I don't want someone to call me a cunt, especially a man, but I think there's ways men can use it.

They don't feel as rooted in misogyny, although of course that word is rooted in misogyny. But I think there's a fair argument for using it sometimes. Now, in my research, I also came across this year dish phrase, which I really like, and I'm so sorry for my pronunciation already. I'll say in Zondir Aroisfaln, nor Aina Zoldir Blabian Af-Zonvetik, which is a curse rather than a standalone swear, and it means make all your teeth fall out, except one to give you a toothache.

Holy shit. Wow, that brutal. I've never heard or thought of something so specific as that. That rules. I'm really, really fun. I love that. So now we've got a little taste of how we might use some swearing. Let's go on to the topic.

at hand. So in his 1998 book, Swearing Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English, Jeffrey Hughes says that swearing shows a curious convergent of the high and the low, the sacred and the profound. Okay. So most other swearing scholars seem to agree with this idea. You separate out swearing into three broad categories, basically. Do you have any idea what these could be?

Shit fucking piss. No shit. To give you a clue, shit would be, and piss would be in one category, fuck could be in another. Can I actually guess? Shit is like something gross. Or like, or like, or like, Defications. Yeah. And, Tom, your favorite. God. Exactly. So, religion.

God damn hell. Holy shit. Sex and sexual body parts, fuck, cock, cunt, and bodyless excretions, shit and piss, okay? Holy shit. That's so good, wow. I never thought of it in that way. And piss this holy to me, so I was shit fucking piss.

The last to get the religion, but sometimes the sex and bodily expression ones become quite conflated. I know about that. No, I don't. I take cut that out at other times. Please don't exit at home. Keep it in.

I got a lot of today's information, primarily from two very good sources. I'll get more explicitly onto the second one later, but the first is a book I read by self-proclaimed swearing expert Melissa Moore. It's called Holy Shit, A Brief History of Swearing.

Oh, that's so good when you said that you read like a whole books to research this topic is this this is the book and it was so fun to read. It's so lost a listener is Ella told us she was reading a book for this.

It's so funny. More compresses the three categories down into just two, the holy and the shit, hence the name of the book. I'm going to go through swearing history based on Melissa Moore's timeline here. So as we go through it, if you can imagine,

a swingometer in your head. You have the holy on one side and the shit on the other, and the needle. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm so sorry. I just realized, holy shit, as the title is a purposeful dichotomy. Oh, Tom. That's genius. That's so good. I'm sorry. I know. Editor Tom, put that realization a little closer. I may have to take your enthusiasm point away from you from earlier.

It seems it wasn't your enthusiasm, but in fact, you're stupidity. Okay, swingometer. Where the needle on the swingometer indicates how prominent and offensive the types of words in each group are at any given point in history. Oh, okay. So throughout history, the needle has swung wildly backwards and forwards between the holy and the shit.

So let's take a look at that history. Oh, wonderful. Oh my God. I'm not going to ask you when you think the oldest squared was uttered. I'm sure that as long as humans could communicate through speech, we were coming up with something akin to profanity. I'm not even going to ask you when the oldest word was recorded. It would make this topic insurmountable. We are going instead to go down the history of swearing in English.

Oh, fine. Okay, cool. And that takes us back to about 2,500 to 2,000 years ago in the Roman Empire. Of course, Roman spoke Latin, not English, but just as Roman politics, literacy, numeracy, and so on, have shaped the English-speaking world today, so have Romans given us a model for obscenity.

Now, if we look to modern times, linguists generally agree that we have the big six swear words in English. Can you take a guess at what those are? As in, like, the big six words that have been around fur. No, no, no, the words that we consider like the most obscene now, the big six swear words. Let's take turns, Caroline. I'll start with fog. Yeah, can't. Yeah. Shit. Yeah. Fuck, can't shit.

It's so thoughtful. It's piss up there. Piss, yeah. No, that's really, really. I thought that was just me. Hell. No, there's no holy ones in here. Oh, okay. Dick. Yes, yes. Dick or cock and ass or ass. No, I would say. So you have cunt, fuck, cock, ass, shit and piss. Okay. And much like us, the Romans also had a big 10.

Oh, so they are cutness or cunt. Futuo to fuck. Mantula, cock. Verpa, which is an erect or circumcised cock. Landicah, cocklits, colors, ass, pedico, which is to penetrate an anus.

Cacko to shit. In rumo and fellow, which don't have direct translations, and I'll come onto that. So you can see here, we have some very similar words to swear words we have today. We have some that are familiar words, but they're not in use as obscenities.

And some that don't even have one for translations. So let's start with one of the familiar ones. And apparently mine and Caroline's favorite swear word in Latin, kunas or cunt. So this actually did directly gave rise to conno in Spanish and con in French, but not cunt in English. I should say there's no record of cunt in English until the 12th or 13th century. Well, after Latin had left kind of any

common place parlance in Britain. Out of circulation at that point. Yeah. Yeah. The first record of cut is actually in the name of a London street in the red light district at the time called God forgive me. Gropecunt Lane. Wow.

I wasn't expecting it to be that hunchy. Yes. I'm just staring into the middle distance. Oh, England. Well, this, you say, oh, we're gone. This informed your swear words as well, Tom. Yeah. Yeah.

So that likely, or that cut in English, likely comes from the Old English Quyth, which means womb, which itself comes from proto-Germanic content. Still, the Roman cutness informs how we use cut today because it was equally as shocking and offensive as the way we use it now. Really?

Wow! So there's like plenty of graffiti pointing to the use of connoisse in ancient Rome. For example, for two-iter connoisse, pilosos, molto, meleus, quam, globa, or it is much better to fuck a hairy cunt than one which is smooth. Real. Wow! I am falling mouth again.

The fact that this is on graffiti is actually what indicates to us that this is an obscenity and not just a word used in normal vocabulary. Because this was the question that I was wondering in my head when you said what's the first recorded swear word, which obviously we're not getting into, but I was just like, but how would we know that that swear word?

A swear word was a swear word. That's a really good point. And in Latin, where words do and do not appear are really useful for distinguishing swear words from non-swear words. So here's a quote from Holy Shit. If a term is found in graffiti or epigrams, which are short, witty, or often dirty poems, and nowhere else, we can be pretty sure that it's a very bad word. If it appears in satire graffiti and epigrams, it's pretty bad, but not one of the worst.

And then to add to that quote, if it appears in something like an elegy or an epic, it's probably not a bad word at all. Yeah, that's fascinating. It's like jazz. It's the swear words you don't see. That's so interesting. So that's how we know, out of the many, many Roman words for excrement, that cacao is the obscenity.

Yeah, it's like, what does the medical records say versus what you write on? That's so interesting. Yeah. So I should say Kako is an obscenity, but not as bad as obscenities that were related to sex, because there was just less taboo around defecation. Yeah. You know, because people did that in public around other people. Yeah, they had shared latrines.

One of the big 10 that I find really interesting is Landicca or clit. Yeah, because we have that word, but it's not an obscenity. It might make people go a bit. But it's not something you use to offend someone with. I'm not cutting around and going, ah, you're clit. Like that's just not fucking clit. Actually, that sounds cool. Stop trying to make clit of it. This is apparently one of the worst. You were right to give a warning at the start, actually. You're right.

You knew us better than we knew ourselves.

So Landerco is apparently one of the worst things you can call a woman in ancient Rome, because to be labeled as having like a large clip, that would be calling a woman a lesbian, meaning that she, it means she fucks like a man, which is unacceptable because it's a very, it was a very aggressively patriarchal society. So that kind of Caroline giving the expression of like, I would be honored. I would be honored. I would be honored. I would be honored. I would be honored. I would be honored. I would be honored. I would be honored. I would be honored. I would be honored. I would be honored. I would be honored. I would be honored.

Thank you.

But this kind of really sex focused patriarchal society also explains why we don't have direct translation towards like Iremo and fellow. And these both relate to sucking dick. They're both mean to like fellow like Felicia, you know. But it's being on the giving end, not the receiving end. So you would think that this would be directed at women, but these worst of worst insults were actually largely reserved for other men.

Because romans didn't have a concept of homosexuality and sexuality like we do it was fine for men to have sex with men but only if you were the active dominant partner. I have room and fellow being such horrible well slurs really i think it would be fair to call these.

what we consider now homophobic slurs, even though wrote the Romans did not consider homosexuality a thing in the same way we do. Yeah, it's still, yeah, which is but it's interesting the nuance of that, I guess. Yeah. Well, yeah, because they still almost feel quite sexist as well, of course, because if you are the receiver, yeah, exactly. And therefore, you must suck dick like a woman or something is like where it goes to in my head. So, yeah.

Yeah, in terms of like the ranking of like people in terms of sex in Rome, it was like men who were active partners, women, and then the men who were the receiving partners. Yeah. And that's why I like fuck because of the equality of it.

It's an equal opportunist swear word. Even people who are ace can use fuck. It's a sense that even I feel like. That's my hope. It does transcend. And at the time these words really didn't transcend. They were what they meant.

And which I think is an interesting thing to think about. So anyway, you can see throughout all of this that Romans, Roman swearing, ancient Roman swearing was led by masculinity and how that tied into sex. And that's not unlike how we have gotten many of our obscenities or how they're used today, but it's a lot more extreme. So 2000 years ago, if we think of our swingometer, that it's fully over to the shit.

And right now, I would say that's where we find it today as well. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But there would be a lot of changes in language before we would find ourselves back here, because we take a kind of bigger jump now as we move into the Middle Ages, roughly 470 to 1500 AD. Things are very

different in terms of swearing. Interestingly though, we do start to see the words which we now find offensive crop up for the first time. In an English translation of the Bible, you could read phrases like this, the Lord will smite you with the boils of Egypt on the part of the body which the turds are shut out.

Wow. That's Deuteronomy 28, 27. I was gonna be like, and then God said, let's fucking go. So as well as Bible verses like this, out in the real world, you may have come across animals called Shite Row, which is now known as a Heron, or Windfucker, which is a Kestrel.

When I have gone A to B, I was like a dung beetle, maybe. The street I mentioned before group, Kunt Lane, that was around in medieval times. But Kunt wasn't an offensive word. Kunt was a commonplace word for vulva. Oh, wow. And children may have even learnt this word from books called vulgaria, not vulgar as in bad language, just as in common language. No. Wow.

Is that also is that the origin of that is like the origin of vulgarisms? Oh, fucking shit.

Sorry, that was not, sorry, that was genuine, that was not, that was not me taking into the topic. It was so good. I know, but like, wow. The chat, chite, row, wind fucker, group, cunt laying, clearly the people in middle ages were largely unconcerned with the shit. Yeah. Because the needle has now swung all the way over to the holy. Also, I realize anytime I say holy fucking shit, that's like a grand slam. Yeah.

So to quote Holy shit, the worst, most dangerous kind of language in the Middle Ages was swearing. Swearing at that time had a very particular meaning, the biblical meaning. It referred only to oaths by God.

Sincerely done, swearing was one of the bases of stable government and social order, badly or frivolously, that is vainly done, it threatened to wreak havoc with the smooth running of society and even to injure God himself. The Holy provided the strongest booze and most highly charged language.

Wow. So basically swearing by God, if done, you know, with sincere and good intention was fine. But swearing by God, if you're lying or done in vain. So they would say like, by God's soul or for Christ's passion, I either modern day equivalents of, Oh my God, that was worse than going out into a children's play park and screaming, you fucking cunt at the top of your lung.

And it's not terribly surprising that saying something like, by God's bones, which is a genuine phrase that they would have used at the time, would make for gasp, as Christianity Catholicism specifically is an incredibly strong force during this period, the church and state are entirely linked through the monarchy in Britain, and religion is imposed on every part of your life, including your profanity.

So that's the middle ages, but as we kind of move a bit past this and we enter the Renaissance from 1500 to 1660 is the shifting tides of Christianity, which moves the swingometer needle more towards the center of the holy ship is the holy starts to lose its power. And I think how this happened is actually fascinating.

I cannot believe a very long story short through various means and by the hands of various monarchs Protestantism or the church of England becomes the dominant religion in the UK over Catholicism I got all us to say carella This is this is the only way to make this kind of history what that is normally quite dull to me very interesting

So as we come into the 1550s, Catholics are being widely persecuted. They would have to pay penalties if they refused to attend Protestant services. If they protected priests who were considered heretical at the time, they could even face death. So during this time, something called an oath ex officio, meaning by virtue of office was put to all people who were arrested for heresy.

Essentially, they had to swear by God that they would answer all questions truthfully before they'd even been given an idea of what those questions might be. This could get them in a lot of trouble, potentially death. In this impossible situation, many Catholics chose, instead, equivocation, the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth.

So they weren't outright lying, but basically this kind of lying but not lying thing under oath became so embroiled in decades of ensuing religious tensions that the power of swearing in oath just lost its meaning. It was no longer this absolutely sacred thing because people weren't using it properly anymore. So if swearing in oath by God is no longer sacred, then swearing in vain is no longer a mortal sin.

So how strong these holy swears were became just weakened. Is that interesting? Yeah. Also, by of all things, bureaucracy is so fine. But yeah, no, I totally I can see because also because it's like, you know, when you were first talking about it, I was like, it feels so purposeful to say like, you know, by God's bones, right?

like that feels so, but like, now this era, I get more where I'm like, you know, you're kind of like, it's like an annoyance more than it is like a strict ruling. And so I can see this getting almost like light hearted about like all these fucking guys, you know. But it hadn't been for so long. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I will say that there are other factors that play into kind of the holy swear words, losing their power and the rise of capitalism, over feudalism for one. But I won't get into that.

Oh, that's fair. So at the same time as we're seeing the decline of the Holy, you have a rise in the obscenity of the shit. So we talked about in Middle Ages, you had no real distinction between obscene words and the things they represented. You know, shin was just shit meant poo, shit was shit.

I mean, it's not fair to say that words like shit and piss weren't seen as bad. They were considered like foul or villainous words that encouraged sin because they referred to. Yeah, but genuinely that's what they refer to because they refer to naughty things, but they weren't actually swear words. They weren't obscenities. But in the 16th century, we start to see these words become more actively obscene and a big part of this is the rise of shame.

Oh! Oh! So you have in ancient Romans and people living in medieval times largely lacked a sense of embarrassment when it came to things like shitting or being nude. Oh my god. But during the Renaissance, wealthy people especially started to get more privacy. They had private toilets for the first time. They had their own rooms to change in. And it created this sense of shame.

An embarrassment around the body and bodily functions and thereby also kind of trickled down into the words associated with them. Yeah, of course. So you start to see these words become more like swear words, but it's trickling.

But it's not until the 18th and 19th centuries which would fully see these words develop into a scene in a way that we would recognize today. That's so recent to me. Yeah. And this is largely thanks to the good old Georgians and Victorians and their extreme repression. I'm so glad the Victorians have come up once again as fucking shit off as they often do.

There's a whole other history lesson here as to why, of course, Victorian society especially became so concerned with morality, civility and like following a strict set of social codes. And I'm not going to get into that. But the result of that was that even things like legs and trousers were considered something not to be mentioned in polite circles.

Wow, I guess this is where like the idea of a woman showing her ankles becomes like super scandalous, right? Which we still take the piss out of today. But even, but even, I'm what I'm saying is even saying those words. Like that's not okay. Wow. So you can see why anything referring to a body part or something coming out of a body would start to become horrifically obscene. Well, yeah, if legs bad, then

Pooping and shit and shit and shit and like no goes and cock. This is also the first time in history we really that we are aware of at least. Sorry my brain came up with ankle sucker instead of cocks. Just not to get that into the world. Just to share that with the class.

This is also the first time that we've seen words like fuck and shit being used non literally. So you're using them for emotional charge in the way you said before and that adds a lot more weight to them as square words. I can't go on without mentioning the class.

And people trying to create a stronger class divides also plays a massive role in this. So speaking properly gave you moral and social superiority over the lower classes. So speaking, obscenities became associated with the lower class, something which I think is very much a holdover in modern times. Yeah. Yeah.

But like with Shane before, we have seen a kind of trickle down of this set, this kind of sensibility into all classes. So that's our Victorians. Now, of course, this is quite recent history, you know, the last two, 300 years and refers to Georgian and Victorian England, where we could apply the previous history more broadly to other English speaking countries. It doesn't work here as well.

because the colonies have started to become much more separate, if not straight independent, right? Yeah. You still see some of this propriety exported to like American Australia, but not entirely because there isn't that connection anymore. And that goes some way to explaining why words like cunt aren't as offensive in Australia compared to the UK. I was going to say, yeah.

And the U.S. I feel like it's the most not okay. Using God's name in vain is often still more offensive in America compared to the UK. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. In parts of the U.S. Like the more religious areas. We very recently, I think we'll plug it at the end, but we were on Escape This Podcast and the hosts are both Australian. And it was very funny. They said at the top, they're like, it's always funny what words Americans think are swears that like we can just say on TV here, you know?

They were like, you can say hell, that's fine. Oh, yes, of course. Hell is. I think Hank Green did a video recently where he said that hell was a swear word or like he did a tweet about it. And I was like, it's not a swear word. Here it is not a swear word. It's just like, and that's interesting. And that's so interesting that it's probably because of the divided this time where

We start to see things like shit and fuck become more offensive, but you're still whole in America because of the lack of connection between countries. Now you're still holding that a bit more than we ever did. It's like a species that's been separated. Honestly, it's starting to evolve on its own doing its own thing. Just how impactful any of these words

on now has certainly changed from like this aggressively repressed and religiously conservative time. You know, that we've had two World Wars, the evolution of social culture through the media and internet, lots of other things have happened. And that has ended up softening quite a lot of these swear words. They're not as much of a big deal to some people swearing, you know, it flourishes in public like never before, at least since the horrible, horrible ancient Romans.

And given how prevalent it is, I want to ask you guys, does it make you feel naughty to swear? What an interesting question. Within the context of your history with swearing, you know, what is your history with it? And does it make you feel bad to swear?

I feel like saying the word cunt still gives me a little like, and it's not even like me, but like wondering if if I say it in front of somebody and that person becoming offended because I still feel like it has like a little bit of weight in the UK and obviously like now that we are interacting with the Americans more on a global scale, you know, being aware of their views on those words as well impacts that. Yeah, I think some people hearing this at first might be like,

Ooh. Yeah. Yeah. Cunt is a bad word in the UK. Like you wouldn't say it in front of like your parents or your boss, but yeah, I would say no one's if no one in my social circle is going to like shrink back if I say it. Oh, no, absolutely not. No. Yeah. It's like if you guys, I feel like it's like if one of your parents said it, you'd be like, ooh, someone. If my dad said I'd be like, hey, dad, we need to talk.

conversation. What about you, Tom? What's your kind of history with swearing that makes you kind of feel a certain way?

Up until high school, even though I was online and I saw a lot of swearing, I felt very actively, was very genuinely using like frick and like flippin' and stuff. And because I think also, I think part of, there was some influence in like some spaces like the vlogbrothers space. You know, it's like where I was very actively not swearing and then I joined my theater group in high school and it was fucking game over.

It was truly a new jersey. Yeah, theater group. It's yeah. And now I swear like a sailor. Although I feel like I can turn it off not not not not uneasily. I feel like, you know, in and out. Yeah, I think so. Whereas for me, like, I think when I started working at the science museum and I was working around kids quite a lot, that changed how I used language because of how I was interacting.

I'm fucking annoyed by these fucking noises. Sorry, fucking annoyed by these little shit that were just everywhere. I was swearing a lot less and felt like I had to turn it off and then couldn't turn it back on again. I still don't think I swear in the same way that I did before having that job. Did you think that changes the impact it has on you? When you swear, do you get a different feeling from swearing? It's almost feels worth, feels naughtier.

Well, no, but like I mentioned earlier, I think it then means that when I do swear, because it's changed how I swear and I swear a lot less now, especially when I'm in a working environment, it then means that when I do swear, people clock it a lot more. So like I mentioned with my colleague being like, I'd worked with him for like four months. And I said, fuck for the first time in front of him. And he went, I've never heard you say that word before.

It is so funny when you hear someone swear for the first time. You can do it. I swear a lot so I think people don't notice that I do it. I also find because I swear a lot it's lost a lot of its bite like in terms of like I don't feel like anything coming at me just feels like normal language.

Most of the time, though, in the right context, because I have slipped up because I'm so used to swearing that if I was sorry in front of a work colleague or my grandmother, I would still feel bad about that, right? Because despite changes in culture since the 18th century, these are words and phrases which through their very utterance are mental arousal reactions. Swearing is taboo, how taboo is completely context-pended, but mostly it is. And in spite of that,

We keep on fucking doing it. Yeah. The frequency and spread of swearing remains incredibly high. And that's because swearing is a very powerful thing. Yeah. This is fun.

Well, the fun is part of it, certainly. There's a really extensive review article by Stapleton et al. titled The Power of Swearing. What we know and what we don't really gets into why swearing is so powerful. Ultimately, it boils down to the fact that it can do things that other language just cannot cognitively, socially, emotionally, physiologically. Right.

Yeah, I feel like there's a famous myth busters where they talk about how swearing through pain can sometimes alleviate. Can help it. Yeah. Did they bust the myth or did they prove it? I think they should support for it. Yeah. Well, they should have because there's a lot of research about it. Oh, wow. Yeah. So, okay, let's kind of go through some of the points about why swearing is a total force. So, first of all, swearing is an incredible

incredibly useful social tool. I think the negative side of this feels quite obvious, right? Swearing is an implement to be abusive to people. It can really clearly put across your negative emotions, but I don't necessarily always feel like the social benefits of swearing are considered as much. The paper lays out something I never noticed before, but I definitely do.

have seen others do to me, which is you use swearing to signal intimacy and trust in a group or in a person.

you're saying, I trust you enough to swear around you. Absolutely. Like we mentioned, we swear less in front of our colleagues and people that we maybe know a little bit less well and have not quite got that same rapport with. Whereas like one of the reasons why that coworker had never heard me swear in four months was because like we just weren't close enough as coworkers yet for me to swear in front of them, right? Yeah. It's so I just love

how positive and sweet the word like intimate is. And then tying that to swearing is like, it seems counterintuitive, but it's as I'm thinking about like, that's actually kind of nice. That's really cool. Yeah. You know, you know, the first, you know, it's like the first time you grab beers with your coworker and you're like, you just like, I let out big like fuck what a day or, you know, it's like, it's intro. I hadn't thought about like that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You'll like set your

It's like a signal to them, like, yes, I can relax around you. I'm being more my authentic self now, yeah. And research does apparently show that this feeling of intimacy is more prevalent in women than men. So women are more likely to use this as a sign. I love that.

In a social sense, while swearing is also really good again, people's attention, you can use it stylistically to enhance what you're saying. We do it all the time on this podcast. We use swearing as a signal that we are really excited about something, not just a little bit excited. Two studies in the early noughties actually found that texts containing swear words were more believable and or persuasive than those words. I would have thought it would be the opposite way around, but I guess it depends on the context.

Not in a professional setting. Yeah, there we go. Don't do that in professional standards, but between like friends. You guys are all fucking laid off. So I mean, you know, swearing does a lot socially, both swearing and the absence of swearing. You know, it shows your personal style, your style of humor, your group dynamics. I just think it's amazing. Just a single word has that kind of social influence. It's just absolutely fantastic.

It's also so cool that we just do it, right? When we curse, we're not thinking in our mental calculus, we're like, oh, this will ingratiate me, or I should use this word at this sparse. It's just such a good point. Yeah, we just do it naturally. It's interesting. It's a natural... It's so innate, isn't it? Like bonding or natural kind of social behavior that we've adapted as humans who could speak. It's so good.

So now looking inside ourselves away from the world, swearing actually plays a very unique role in our brain. Oh, newer research shows that swearing at least the more reflexive emotional type of swearing that you do without thinking is actually processed by a different part of the brain than normal speech.

Oh, where normal speech activates higher order processing structures that you need to actually conceive something. Swearing seems to activate the amygdala and the basal ganglia. According to the paper, quote, these are deep structures in the brain that play a central role in the processing of memory and emotion.

Processing in the amygdala slash limbic system is automatic and impulsive in nature. It is difficult to inhibit and can remain intact following damage to other areas of the brain. In effect, swear words might be seen to trigger an evolutionary based fight or flight response in the individual. Wow. So it's actually fascinating because it explains some people who get aphasia which is an impairment of speech can still often swear. No way.

That's so cool. And it's also interesting to separate because it's not like the word created the region or like it's more just like.

Yeah, I'm trying to parse the cause and effect here, because it's like parts of our language that we care about so strongly. Yeah, exactly, exactly. We'll come on to a bit more to why this might happen. I also need to say, does this imply that the region of our brain and the region of our brain are closer than we thought?

Yeah, very good. This kind of where we process swearing, reflexive swearing might also explain why we do reflexively swear in a stressful or frustrating situation. Like, you know, if you get into a car crash, a new screen fuck or whatever, and why we find swearing cathartic as well, and when we're angry or frustrated, and then likely connected to this strange interaction with our brain, swearing has some rather unusual physical effects or does.

Todd, we've already said this, but there is a big body of research which shows that swearing can relieve pain and increase pain tolerance. In one of the earlier studies, participants had to hold their hands in ice water for as long as they could stand it. Yeah, that's what the most bastards do, I think. Whilst either swearing or just saying like neutral words, and the people who were swearing could keep their hands in the water longer. And there's been lots of studies along this line. Easy as that, hi, yeah.

I love, it's so good, they came up with a control that also had them yelling words, but just being like, ooh, cat, wallpaper, sandbag, neutron. It's funny, I remember when I was nine, I was like cycling down a paved hill and I fell off my bike, and after I'd finished like skidding down on my elbows and my knees, like bloodied the luck, I just sat there for like a couple of minutes just going, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. And I really distinctly remember the pain like he's in. Wow. But I heard about this effect of swearing being like a pain reducer a couple of years ago. Yeah. And I've tried to use it in painful situations since and it just flat out hasn't worked. And that's because the effect is reduced if you swear more in your day to day life. It just doesn't have the same potency. I don't know if we know why though, because we're not quite sure why it has a pain relieving effect.

Yet. Mine I recommend Ella. Click. Next time you. One thing I don't necessarily think you will have heard that I hadn't heard about is that swearing can apparently make you stronger. I've not heard that. That's why you're the strongest host.

I was doing Paul's going, fuck. That's how you would do it. So no way. It was a day found that participants showed increased power and capacity in a kind of like stationary cycling task and a hand grip test when they were swearing during it.

That's what Goku was doing when he powers up. He swears along to his breath. They couldn't figure out in the paper why it caused an increase in power and strength. I was going to say, because they were looking to see if it triggered the autonomic nervous system, but it didn't seem to. Oh, and that seems to be why pain, then again, not sure, but they seem to be. That's why swearing has a pain tolerance effect. So it's very, there's,

I mean, there's still a lot we don't know about swearing, basically. I just laid out some of the reasons why swearing can be so powerful, but we still don't know how it has all of these effects. And the most widely accepted hypothesis is that we are negatively conditioned in childhood through being punished for swearing, to give swearing heavy emotional weight, which ends up triggering these effects in your brain later in life.

When I was growing up, my mom didn't like it when we said, oh, man. When I was a kid, I was at school and I started singing the song that was like, shut up, just shut up, shut up. And a kid told on me for swearing and I'll never forgive them for that. Shut up.

What a clit. I started swearing around my mum when I was quite young. And I think, you know, some parents will swear in front of the kids, but if they do it, they get angry. My mum was like, well, I guess I've sworn in front of me. Yeah, right. Like when people are like, oh, I wouldn't swear in front of my grandparents. I absolutely would swear. I wouldn't swear in front of my grandparents, but that's because my grandparents are Mormons. I thought we'd do it.

So they say they say pig, I guess instead of like this pig in hell. I like that. I love it. We're adopting pig and clit. Anyway, okay, back to the topic at hand. So this idea that

we may have been conditioned into the cognitive and physiological effects of swearing. I think I am probably inclined to agree with this, but I think it's also important to say that this link has never been demonstrated through research because that would be incredibly difficult and unethical to do. We didn't have identical twins.

And also there isn't a universal experience of punishment for swearing in childhood. So obviously I guess the idea is that if you weren't punished maybe you wouldn't find these kind of cognitive and psychological effects as great.

Some people do even if they haven't had that experience a chartered so it's hard to say. I don't know if you will ever have a really good answer as to why it's so powerful, but it is. It is. At the end of all of this, I don't want you to think I can don't tell your boss to go fuck themselves or say and cut in front of anyone you want, but maybe.

Just maybe next time a naughty word escapes your lips, you can appreciate that in many ways it's not just a word, it's millennia of context, it is intrinsic to language as saying your name, saying a pronoun or the, and it can do things for us that other parts of language just cannot do on so many levels.

That's the end of the topic. Please do share your favourite swear words and phrases and discards, but under a spoiler tag, so as not to offend anyone, and please be conscious of the fact that yes, a lot of swearing is rooted in things like misogyny and homophobia, racism, whatever. I didn't get into slurs and epiphytes as a form of swearing because that was just too heavy for this topic, and I don't necessarily feel the right person to talk about it, but those are a form of swearing. Don't share anything like that.

Um, just to finish us up, I want to share a few that were shared in my channel or discord. Cause I asked my. So great sage equal to the podcast said, Damala, betch, la nia, sudden a day, which means I'm going to slap your fucking mom in wall off.

I love, and that translates beautifully, doesn't it? It keeps its zing. Geo said Smeghead, which is English from Smegma, a symptom of a sexually transmitted disease, disgusting Smeghead. It actually, I believe, comes from the TV show Red Dwarf, but I still really like it. Smeghead, he might say it in English.

Someone who's just name is just a string of letters. A-S-O-I-D, A-S-O-I-D, F-J-A-M, K-S-L-F said, the Dutch swear canker is sort of interesting because it literally means cancer. And compared to other ones that are referred to X-Men or the devil or sexual activity or people who take a sexual activity, it's so different. Canker. I really like that. But it is an actual swear word in Dutch. So that's very interesting. Or like at least used offensively.

But the slogan fuck cancer is a real like, oh, it's a double attack. Yeah. And do share them, as I said, but please. Yeah, be a little careful. This is amazing. This is such a fun tour through all this.

It is also interesting because, um, as science communicators, I feel like this is a thought that comes up, not just on the podcast, but also like in videos, right? Like in most of my TikToks, I do not swear.

And on this show, I don't know if we ever, I don't know if we ever even talked about it if that was something to do. I think maybe we have had comments from listeners before to asking us to swear less.

I think the ultimate decision was that we don't feel like we swear a lot, but also swearing means different things in the UK than it does in the US, so it's not necessarily as easy for me and Caroline to turn it off. I was going to say that I think I heard Hank talk about this recently. It's like, on the one hand, some people will say like,

you can reach a broader audience if you swear less. But as you've been saying, Ella, swearing does also mean something unique too. So it's like swearing can also reach a different audience. And in a different way, you know, it's like, it's like, it's not that like not swearing is universally better, right? It's that that you've so as you've shown, the positives of swearing can sometimes make science communication, maybe even rings truer or even more effective in some ways, strangely.

Exactly. It's kind of what I said. It's what I said. I think we use swearing as like a form of punctuation, like an exclamation mark a lot of the times on the podcast. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't want to offend anyone. Or even even humor is in a bad thing either. Yeah, sorry. Humor.

I don't want to offend anyone, obviously, but I don't necessarily think we're not using it in an offensive way. We're using it as a form of communication, which is what all of this last bit at the topic is really cool. It's neat. It's something I've always thought about, but it's really cool to have the better words to talk about this now, which is cool.

Anyway, sorry, there's so much work until that's talking. I just separated this topic into just history and power of swearing, but they're so many amazing. I'm sorry, I didn't have time to do it. I can't wait for a leaf to and swearing. We could coordinate. Oh my fucking God. The seasons may change.

Outside the leaves may fall, but something that will never change its colors. It's evergreen. It's review corner. It would be a shame if autumn came and we were like, oh, they're all gone. All the reviews just become suddenly horrible.

This review comes from Gayatri is not dead on Apple podcast. And they say, I love this podcast so much that I downloaded Apple podcast to write a review. Wow. That's dedication. I started listening to Let's Learn Everything in July of 2023 and speed ran through about 40 episodes in three weeks because I was instantly hooked. Now putting on the latest episode, every other Thursday on the bus in the morning is absolutely the highlight of the day for me.

I was never a fan of nonfiction slash science podcast because they always seemed boring to me until I discovered LLE. Tom, Ella, and Caroline have amazing chemistry and never failed to delight and educate. The trio also appeared on lateral for the first time, the very day that I had caught up with the backlog of episodes. So I took that as a sign from the heavens. P.S., if this makes it into review corner, that was a great segue Ella. Thank you so much.

It wasn't. But I wanted to swear, but we told people we didn't want to hear the swearing to skip, so you got that unstudded. I love that I love references to review God of us. It's so funny. Do we have any plugs or shout outs? Yes, we do. We're plugging ourselves appearing on escape this pod. How excited?

We are friends of friends through the lateral network that exists out there. But have been meaning to collaborate for a while because it's an escape room podcast. It was a fucking blast. It was such a blast to do this. I've never felt more clever and rambunctious at the same time.

It was so fun. They built this amazing virtual room for us. So give that a listen. It was so funny. It was so fun to do. They're amazing. And we also play as a character together. Yeah. In the funniest way possible. In the most LLE way that we could. We said as a joke and they ran with it. It was great. It was so good.

The episode is called Ocean Anakin's Part 3. That's Ocean Anakin's spelled O-C-E-A-N Ocean Anakin's. And it's called Part 3 of the series, but you can absolutely just listen to that episode alone. It's a standalone episode. But yeah, Danny and Bill are amazing, and go check that out.

I might give a little shout out to the show that I mentioned at the beginning of my topic, which is called an evening of unnecessary detail. They have a big show at Cambridge Theatre in London coming up. I'm going to go and enjoy it. That's on the 2nd of December. So if anybody does want to go to that, I would recommend it if you like the show. You're probably like that.

Cool. And I would like to give a shout-out to the word landica. Lovely. Which means something in Latin from that topic. Thank you.

If you want to give a shout out to a swear word, go pop over to a discord over at let's learn everything dot com, share any other leaf facts. Apparently, there's a million of them. You don't have to put the leaf facts under a spoiler tag put the swear words under a spoiler tag again.

Maybe any, any pictures of people. I was just going to say send us. If you don't want to fall into the, the vulgarness of sharing the swear words. Share a little early photo instead, you know, balance out the server for us.

If you do if you can actually say like if you happen to like a species of a tree and then you can show us the leaves I would be actually quite curious about that. So today we've learned about the chemistry of leaves and how they change colors as well as the various theories about why they are green and yellow and red.

From conserving energy to to a posomatic responses to their effects on whole ecosystems and how much there still is to learn about leave the secret world of leaves.

We also learned about swearing, our favorite swears, the holy shit dichotomy, how we can even find swear words and the evolution of English swear words from Roman sexual swears to the holy era of swearing to the era of shame and privacy. We've learned that swearing is both psychologically and socially effective, but still mysterious in its mechanisms. Most importantly, we learned how universal it is to swear.

And you can join us next time, where we will learn about every day!

I did try to look into, like, historic beliefs around, like, autumn leaf changes. Wow. Wow. And leaves, actually. I'm just going to let you two, like, have the leaf belief. We said this as a joke that we keep going on, but we really have now. I hope you like it, guys. OK, we've stopped.

Let's leave everything. I can't believe you just said that. What the fuck? Ah! Stupid. Leave. Maximum fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows, supported directly by you.