This episode is brought to you by squar space. Start building your website today at squarespace dot com. Enter offer code History at check out to get teen percent off squarespace. Build it Beautiful. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I am Trazy Wilson and I'm Holly Frying and we have a guest on the show today. We are talking to Dr Elizabeth p Archibald. She is the author of Asked the Past Pertinent and Impertinent Advice from Yesteryear, which started out as a blog just called Asked the Past. If you're not familiar with it, it's this collection of tidbits drawn mostly from medieval and early modern works, mainly written in Europe, with a little brief commentary to And this focus is really because of Elizabeth's focus and interest in this time and place in history. We could foresure talk about advice from the rest of the world and the rest of history too, and if you're interested in that, uh that the same same sorts of things we're going to talk about today also make an appearance in our episode on Say Shanagons Pillow book from the hay On era in Japan, so advice is not limited just to Europe, but that is Elizabeth's focus. So and some of this advice is uh, flat out odd ball. The very idea that somebody ever thought you might need to know or tell someone how to trim your toenails underwater is a little bit strange. There are also some really weird recipes. There's one from five a recipe for making a sort of snail based limbus, which apparently is like a theme through our show Everything is like limbus, and another one from sixteen sixty about making a giant egg as big as twenty eggs out of twenty eggs with other assorted ingredients. It's like a giant Japanese robot situation, but with eggs, where they all come together and make a super egg. There are other how to use in this book that started making sense, but then they take this almost surreal turn. So there's, for example, this six fifty advice for singing. A singer should not sing through the nose. Sure, that makes sense. He must not stammer lest he be incomprehensible, So right, that works too. He must not push with his tongue or lisp, else no one will hardly understand half of what he says, so all this is still common, valid advice. But then it says he should also not close his teeth together, nor open his mouth to wide, nor stretch his tongue out over his lips, nor thrust his lips upward, nor distort his mouth, nor disfigure his cheeks and nose like the long tailed monkey, nor crumple his eyebrows together, nor wrinkle his forehead, nor roll his head or eyes therein round and round, nor win with the same, nor tremble with the lips, et cetera. Doesn't that sound like the most pers nickety music teacher on earth? Yes, somebody needed to put that in a book. And yet, even with these silly and weird and whimsical and sometimes frank dangerous uh bits, like training a cat to fire a pistol, what you shouldn't do that? Or making bird muscles, which is a thirteenth century invention, Sometimes it's reassuring that people have wanted to know how to lose weight and attractive partner and avoid acquaintances they don't want to see for hundreds of years. So John H. Young sark One advises, if you want to avoid an acquaintance looking away and not making eye contact. That it's pretty basic. Yeah, I guess that's Sydney. I hope they don't see me kind of arena. But with all this in mind, I cannot wait to hear your talk with Elizabeth, who pulled all of this crazy stuff together from hundreds of years worth of advice and books. Yeah. We've had several episodes lately that you recorded while I was not in the room, and this one I recorded while you weren't here, So sighting twists. Yes. So today I am talking to Elizabeth p Archibald, who is the author of Ask the Past, Pertinent and Impertinent Advice from Yesteryear, which was also a blog. Thank you so much for agreeing to be on the show, Elizabeth, Thanks for having me on. So. I enjoyed this book a whole lot. It's it's little snippets of advice from the past, along with your commentary and artwork. Uh. It's really funny and sometimes also weirdly touching. And it took me about twice as long to read it as I planned because I kept texting holly hilarious things that I found in it. Um, can you tell us how all of this started. How did you get into this chronicling advice from the past. Yeah. Um, So my academic research deals with the history of education and the history of the book. So I am interested in asking questions like what sort of advice people thought it was worthwhile to put in writing, what kinds of things should be taught by a book rather than by a teacher, and what kinds of things it was a it was possible to learn that way. And so I was teaching a course at the Peaboddy Institute of Johns Hopkins University called how To a History of Instruction, which I designed around the idea that you can look at classic historical texts sort of through the lens of the how To manual, so Plato's republic As how To Manual and Machiavelli and so on. And as part of this course, we've spent a lot of time in the George Peabody Library looking at its rare books collection, and the stuff that I turned up was just great. Um. A sixteenth century book about swimming that included advice on how to trem your toe nails underwater. UM. Seventeenth century conduct manuals, eighteenth century books about how to get rid of rats Um nineteenth century guides to palm Reading UM. And at that point that was when I began posting material to a blog. I just realized that the world needed to know how to trim your tone nails underwater in the sixteenth century. And the blog developed an audience, and soon I started getting questions from around the world, like how should I impress my boss, how should I wash my hair? And it just sort of went from there. So did did you notice any trends in the sorts of things that people thought were worth writing down instructions on how to do? Yeah, it's it's really interesting. Some types of how to manuals and books of advice are really actually pretty similar now to their predecessors from centuries ago. UM, and in some cases the actual advice even sort of remains in circulation. Etiquette handbooks are one category that come to mind. UM. Jovanni de la Caza's Galato is a really foundational text for the history of etiquette, and that's one that was translated and imitated almost immediately. UM, and the advice from that book just sort of stayed in circulation. So instructions about how to blow your nose politely? You know, use a handkerchief and then UM, when you're done blowing your nose, don't open the handkerchief in front of people. This sort of thing. U And that was interesting because um, an early French version of that text was translated into English, and then that became the basis for a set of etiquette rules that were copied out by George Washington when he was sixteen years old or something. So it's sort of interesting how some of these things actually just stick around, you know, responding to universal human desires to know how to blow your nose properly. I guess, um, there are a lot of books like this. They just sort of repeated I used over long periods of time. There's a book by Thomas Lupton from the sixteenth century called A Thousands Notable Things, and that one amazingly continue to be published in new editions into the nineteenth century. UM. And then there are things like UM plenty of the elder suggested violets as a hangover cure. And I when when I posted this on the blog, I actually heard from some people who said, oh, yeah, you know, I've heard that too. I've tried it works, okay, UM or Old Lives tales like the recommendation to put butter on your cat's feet to keep it from running away, or the notion that um, a pregnant woman who takes a step first with her right foot is carrying a boy. These pieces of advice, you know, are around from the ancient world, and they're still sort of sticking with us, So that's interesting to they. And it also seems like the the general perception, not necessarily of people who have really studied medieval life, but the sort of common perception of the medieval world is that it was a gross, dirty, mannerless place. But your book actually has a whole lot of medieval manners in it, Yes, lots of manners um. I think etiquette in particular is sort of an interesting story because people who who know about the history of etiquette think that it sort of began in the Renaissance with Jovanni Dela hasa But in fact, there are a lot of etiquette manual sort of conduct books from the Middle Ages that are articulating these important principles of cleanliness and politeness and things to do and not do at the dinner table, and what types of animals you're allowed to bring into the dining room and what types you're not and all of that stuff. I like the one about I think this was later than that, but the one about leaving a party and not bringing your horse into the hall unless you are instructed. But it's okay to have your horse in the hall, yes, which is excellent advice for a party even today. So let's take a little break from this interview, Holly, I am delighted to learn this idea that you should put butter on your cat's paws when you move so that it doesn't get lost goes way back in history. Yeah. I have heard that advice for hairballs, you know, to help your cat pass a hairball or cough one up, but never as a trekking option. But it seems sort of brilliant and possibly delicious. And the idea is that you put the butter on the cat's paws and let it walk around, leaving buttery tracks in your new home. But then it will lick the butter off it's pause and get the scent of the new place and not run away. That is this idea that apparently has been around a really long time, which somehow you cat lady have not heard. But I cat lady have no, it's pretty ingenious. There's a logic to it. Yeah, although I picture my very chubby cat Mr Burns just sitting there and licking all the butter off anywhere. But we are gonna actually, uh take a brief word from a sponsor before we hear the rest of this charming and really interestingly informative interview. So let's go do that real quick. So for the next portion of this interview, we are going to talk a little bit about Elizabeth's process and making this book, and then we will get into some of the oddity that is involved in all this old advice. So you have so much advice that's been gleaned from so many places and over such a long span of history. What was your process like for winnowing all this down. Yeah, it's such a fun process. I mean really, it's it's just so lateful to be able to look at old books and sort of page through them and um by these fascinating little pieces of advice and kind of um track down leads, you know, if I find a reference to, you know, an ancient technique for pet to removal, and being able to just sort of look around until I find something interesting Um, it's really great, and I'm very lucky to be situated, uh in a in a nice rare books collection at the George Peabody Library, UM, where I can do a lot of that. But then, of course, these days a lot of material has been digitized too, so there's just so much stuff that are fingertips now that it's possible to dig into medieval manuscripts at a moment's notice, which is really exciting. So I found myself being very envious of your time spent in rare book collections while working on this book, because there there's so many cool gems in rare book collections from around the world. Did you have any just awesome discoveries as you were pouring through these very old rare books to work on this Yeah, absolutely, And I mean it's it's such a quirky project to um. You know, it's it's really fun to be able to look at the old books, but it's also sort of funny to be in these very serious libraries and you know, looking at old hangover cures or um, looking in medieval manuscripts to try to find the best illustration of a cat looking its rare end and that sort of thing. So that's that's been fun as well. Well, yeah, and I had I had sort of I had noted almost for the end as an afterthought, that the process of getting artwork to accompany all these things, But that's that's Actually there's as much artwork in the book as there is text. So did you feel like the process for going through all of these uh instructions compared to the process of finding artwork that that went with it or was that a different experience? Well, I mean it was in some ways a different experience. It as much as I wish that each one of these pieces of advice was illustrated, um, because in some cases I think the results would be pretty fascinating, Um, they don't all have illustrations. And yet it was sort of important to me to be able to offer something from the right time period that at least evoked the right technique. And that was a fun process as well, just sort of um, thinking of the right genres of book that would have illustrations of, you know, people with union brows and that sort of thing. So that that in and of itself was just sort of an adventure in rare books collections, one of the things that you wrote about in the introduction to the book was about how it got to the point that it was hard to distinguish sometimes between parodies of instructions and actual instructions because some of the instructions themselves are so weird. Uh. Are there examples of ones that you either left out because they definitely were a parody or ones that are in the book that you're not quite sure if that was an actual instruction or making fun of this whole uh genre of book. Yeah, it's it's so interesting, I mean, it's it is actually very difficult some tends to know how serious the text is, whether the past is sort of pulling your leg a little bit. Um. In some cases it's pretty clear. There are some parody recipes, um, where it's actually pretty clear that it's a parody, so they call for ingredients like, um, goldfinches feet and the sweat of a pebble and these kind of made up things, so that's a good cue. Um. On the other hand, there are recipes that are apparently serious that call for some some pretty strange ingredients. UM. So you know, when you keep seeing the goal of a weasel, you start to wonder at a certain point how serious it is. But Um. In most cases, I think the outlandish ingredients are serious. Um. Then there's the problem of I mean, it's not really a problem that you will encounter texts that just sort of have a funny tone to them, these authors from the past who are being a little bit ridiculous in the presentation of their advice. And I think that is what's going on in one selection from the book on How to Give Birth from the fifteenth century, where the author recommends that women who are in labor should squeam a lot so that everyone hears them and feels petty for them, and then we'll bring them um roast chickens and fine wines in order to make them feel better. You encounter that too, you know, just these sort of funny authors who are enlivening their serious advice with a little bit of playfulness. Circling back to the weird ingredients. As I was reading there, there are lots of things that call for things like pigeon blood and lots of animal blood. Uh, And I was thinking, Okay, that made me make sense if people were eating a lot of pigeon as their diet, that they might have pigeon blood around. But then it would get into okay, and now you need elephant dung, and I would think, how am I getting elephant dung? That doesn't that seems like it would be a little hard to come by. Yeah, And I think what's going on there is, you know, there are some ingredients that you use because you have them on hand. Um. So that can be herbs in the garden, and various types of animal parts and products, um, you know, the beef blood and the weasel sad and this sort of thing, um. And then there are things that I think are supposed to have sort of an aura of strangeness, and you know, you might sort of believe in the efficacy of the recipe more because the ingredients seems a little bit uh out of the ordinary. Um. I think one example of that is recipes that call for unicorn torn um. And nearly all of the recipes that I looked at that involves unicorns horn sort of acknowledge that this is not something that's going to be accessible to everyone. It's expensive. Um. So if you have the means to choires and unicorns for and then go right ahead, and if not, then you can use this other thing, that'll be fine. So some of the advice that's in here seems so bizarre, but I wonder how anybody ever thought that it would work. And one of the things that really jumped out with me at me is the one that was about killing the snakes by luring them with crab cakes and then hitting them with rashes. Yeah right. I have to say that I have not tried this one, um, but if anyone has, let me know how that turned out for you. Um. Yeah. The radish does not seem to be seemed to me to be the most obvious weapon to use against the snake. I have to admit, why are radish? I think it says a large radish. It specifically is a very big radish, but if it's big enough. Another of the oddities that that kind of jumped out of me is too jump back to the idea of manners, is that a lot of these pieces that are about etiquette are simultaneously written in a way that we would consider to be rather rude. So one of the very first pieces of advice is is all about etiquette, and it's about not burping or passing gas while you're dancing with a lady. But the way that it's written, people would think that that's at least at the very least very indelicate by today's standards. Um. Did you often as you were working on this, find this disconnect between advice that holds up, but a way of discussing it that just seems off compared to what we would expect people to talk about that way today. Yeah, and I don't think that that's entirely a coincidence, um, in the case of that particular text. Um. And this is something that I find with how to manuals generally for everyone where read the piece of advice and you sort of scratch your head and you think, I am not so sure about that. Um. You know, what's the point of a how to manual whose advice doesn't actually accomplish what it says it's going to accomplish. Um. There's another one that actually does sort of more than what it is presenting it face value. UM. And that's that's one of them. And I think it's because it's a Latin poem. Actually it's this is this is a poem on dancing advice. Um. And not in the first edition of this poem, but in later editions it includes the sort of ridiculous comic advice about kind of the earthlier aspects of the dance. And so that that piece of advice about um, not eating onions before you go to the dance and not burping, and you know, if you have to sneeze, here's how you should do it. This seems ridiculous, and it sort of is. I mean, I think the intention of that is not purely too explain to incompetent youth how they should behave at a dance, but um, to entertain people who are reading this, you know, it's actually a work of literature. And then in other cases another advice on etiquette, I think sometimes just effective presenting it in a sort of ridiculous way might help to convey the advice a little bit more forcefully, um, sort of make it more more memorable and kind of shame you into behaving properly. Before we talk about some of the modern parallels of all this weird old advice, let's have another reef word from a sponsor. So we're going to close out our interview with Elizabeth by talking about some of the modern parallels to these old advice and etiquette manuals, a couple of which I had not considered at all. And we're also going to hear about one of her favorite pieces of advice, which is one that surprisingly holds up pretty well today, and then stay tuned afterward on talking because we are going to have some pretty important listener mail. When I before I started reading this book, I was sort of expecting it to be like a medieval slash early modern version of like an advice column. But after getting to the end, it feels almost like uh, medieval and early modern version of men's and women's magazines today. It's it's like a collection that that turns into a five hundred year old Cosmo five hundred years from now. What kind of things do you think people are going to be turning to two to figure out the same sort of of weirdness about how we lived at this point. Yeah, that's a great question, I think. Um, it's true some of some of this material does sort of remind me of magazines. Um. I think the reason for that is, you know, it's responding to me that we still have UM so for instance, um, we're still on the eternal quest for brilliant little life hacks. Right, Um, you know how to soap rab how to how to make a cake when you run out of sugar, how to overcome your fear of heights. Um. All of these things you can find in seventeenth century books. Um, that's all stuff that I think we would probably turn to the internet for today, and a lot of categories. I think that, you know, the internet has become our collective how to manual. Yeah, and and now I had not made that kind of action at all, But now that you pointed out, some of the life packs that exist out there are just as absurd as things in the book, or like instead of instead of scrubbing your potatoes, put them in the dishwasher. I think that's the most absurd one that I could think about or think of it at this at this particular moment. Do you have a favorite of all these just delightful gems of odd and sometimes touching advice. You have a favorite one of all of them? Um? Well, I have a lot of favorites. But um, one of my very favorites is about traveling. Um. And this is from a work from the fifteenth century uh by Santobraska, who wrote Died to pilgrimage to the Holy Land, some sort of a common genre, and the advice that he gives about traveling is not completely unique, but I just really like the way that he articulates it. Um. So he says that a traveler should have two bags with him, and one of them should contain a lot of money, and the other one should contain patients. And I think that anyone who has ever gone through an airport in the modern era has encountered that problem. You really need to have your suitcase with patients. And then, of course he else ha says that you need a lot of cured tongue and ginger syrup in order to settle your stomach while you're traveling. But but I really like the suitcase full of patients well, and the ginger to settle your stomach is one of those that carries all the way through until today. I hear people recommend that all the time, exactly. Yeah, So is there anything else that you just you want to make sure that the world knows about your book? I guess one thing I'd like to add is UM just sort of the idea of what a how to manual is um. And I think in the Renaissance, which is sort of from from my perspective at least, kind of the great age of the how to manual Um, the thing that I really love about how to manuals is that they offer a kind of possibility. They sort of make this promise that you can become someone new and it doesn't require divine intervention or you know, a special status that you're born with, or even ten hours of practice. You just need this clever technique that the book is going to teach you, and you know, maybe a few quirky household ingredients. So you can read these books and find out how to have blonde hair, or improve your memory, or become a you know, smooth courtier or lover instead of a bumpkin. And and that's what I think is really appealing about how to two manuals, and it ties back to that idea of men's and women's magazines and life hacks like these things where if you follow these steps, your life will be easier and better exactly, and you know, who knows how many cases it actually played out that way, but there's just such openers and in the genre. So I would like to thank Elizabeth the Archbald again for taking the time to talk to me. Her book asked the past pertinent and impertinent Advice from Yesteryear is out now it is delightful. Her blog is also delightful. Thank you again for talking to us. Do you also, I know you do because you mentioned it already, have some important and interesting listener mail I do. We've gotten some pretty valid uh corrections on the podcast lately. We got a couple of notes after our episode about the Saint KITT's Slave Revolt about how to say Nevus and Antigua, which you say as I just said them, rather than Nevis and Antigua, which is how we said them on the show. But you have traveled there and you heard most people that you spoke to saying Nevis, which is why you presumed that was cool. I did not look it up because I had heard so many people saying them that way. What I have learned since then is that because most of the people I was talking to were ship's staff and ship's crew, and a lot of them their first language was Dutch or maybe Hindi, or maybe they were from the Caribbean and had a like a Caribbean various Caribbean accent. Those accents affected that pronunciation and it didn't quite translate to how we say it in English in America. So that to be fair is one I did not look up. Uh. The other one we have gotten possibly the most email about of any correction ever. In the correction Olympics ranks high. It's quite high. And most of these letters were kind. Thank you for the most of you who were kind. However, most of them were also incorrect. So this is our episode recently about the Texas Revolution, which that we took. We talked about a siege. A lot of the corrections we got our analogous too. If we had done an episode about uh uh Juan Ponce de Leon, and then the entirety of Atlanta wrote to us to say, it's Ponsta Leon right, which is how there's for those of you who don't know, there is a famous road here in Atlanta. Our offices in fact are on it, which everybody here calls Ponst Leon right, which when I first moved here it made my stomach hurt. But right, that's not how you say his name went in Rome, but you know, centuries later that is how people say the name of the road that was named after him. So what we should have said d in our siege episode about the Texas Revolution, we should have called it the siege of Beijar. We're going to talk about why with two different pieces of mail. The first of them is from my friend Hayden from college, and he uh, I'm not gonna read the whole thing because it was a note to me, not to the podcast, and he said Texas history, particularly the period of the revolution, can be a real mess, so it was nice to hear a clear summary of the events. I have just a couple of comments. First, the pronunciation of Behar when speaking of the village of bejart As is as it was generally known during the colonial and republic periods. The generally accepted pronunciation is Beihar. In modern Texas, the city of San Antonio is in Bear County, and the residents they are pronounced it Bear. You also mentioned that Texas independence was declared March first, thirty six. It was actually declared March second, which was Sam Houston's birthday. I don't know where the second air came from, so that was that was Hayden on how to pronounce Behar. I also got a great email from Samantha. Samantha says, I've been listening to the podcast for years, hoping to hear something that could spark and excuse to write in and I finally have one, but unfortunately, instead of a cute story, it's a slight correction. I appreciate your caveat at the top of the cast regarding the improper pronunciation of the rold are at the end of bey heart, something few people who did not learn the correct malformation to pronounce that particular sound as a child can accomplish. However, the rest of the word is also mispronounced, and then she has like this slanty face in moodicon with the like slightly frown email. I have to start by admitting I am not a native Spanish speaker or a linguist, but I did grow up in San Antonio, and I took Spanish and German in high school. And the proper pronunciation of Bear County, where San Antonio is located, was discussed several times as an example of the influence of the linguistic traditions of the region's main cultural groups on our modern pronunciations of traditional words and names. The original word by heart, being Spanish, was most likely announced behar, treating the the x like a J to sound like ye, yea or ha. We can see this in the original pronunciation of Texas as Taijas, and in the correct pronunciation of Wahaka, a word I love to see non Spanish speakers struggle to pronounce in Mexican restaurants. My language teacher always explained that that beijar pronounced beijar softened to bear under the influence of Germanic language traditions, which came in with large numbers of German immigrants to the area, settling towns like Fredericksburg and New Bronzels. And I should have looked up how to say that before I read this letter, but I didn't. In fact, until about thirty years ago, a form of German was still spoken by elderly native born residents of these towns, much like Creole is still spoken in small parts of Louisiana, and some people even thought the word was actually German in origin but rewritten in Spanish. I think the memory of this story, as well as spending a lot of time in St. Louis and New Orleans, where the mix of French, English, Spanish, and Native American languages have created some very interesting pronunciation standards that are seemingly at odds with traditional correct pronunciations turned into a dilettant fascination with the evolution of language. Uh. And then she actually then she actually recommends um an audiobook of the Great Courses, The Story of Human Language, which is a full semester's worth of classroom lectures about the evolution of language. Um. And then she says that said she was really great that we did the episode. So here's what happened. I looked up how to say beijar at four vo, and we got the Spanish version. We got the Spanish version thinking it would be more correct to the place and time. We were talking about the Spanish language pronunciation of bejar at four vo. When we looked at it was wrong, Like it was frankly wrong. Um. And because you know T e x a s has pronounced Texas Yenglish and and M e x i ceo was pronounced in Mexico and English. And the fact that I have never studied Spanish beyond I think a semester in third grade with yeah or maybe a quarter. It was a very small amount of of third grade Spanish, where we mostly learned numbers in the alphabet. Uh. It did not occur to me that that was wrong. So I'm sorry I messed that up. However, everyone who angrily wrote to us, Uh, we got an email that literally started, um, it's pronounced bear, like, don't don't, don't write to anyone like that. It would not actually have been correct to have called that town bear, but it also was not correct to call it Bexar, which we should have called it Behar. And just as a public service announcement, Uh, most of you were nice. Thank you so much for most of you being nice, But like, just in general, as a general rule, if you're if you're writing to anyone in the world to correct something they have done, imagine that you yourself have just made a large and and and irritating an upsetting air in front of literally thousands of people. Kind Of imagine how you would feel about that before you write your email to yell at them about it, and know that you're one of thousands of people doing something. Yeah, we got literally hundreds of emails. My my, I mean, I don't. People are welcome to couch their complaints anyway they want. I'm not there the boss of them. My thing that is always like when people start something like that and it's my ears bled and I cried and I'm like, okay, Nobody on this podcast is like, let's make some mirrors bleed today. We're going to really rock this. You know, I don't want to hurt anybody with mispronunciation. It is an accident, always right. Neither of us are ever like I don't care, just saying, however, you well, and to start of give you a little behind the scenes, behind the scenes of stuff you missed in history class. The level of effort that we take to find correct pronunciations just does not correspond to a reduction in how many corrections we get about it. It does regardless of what steps we take. Like for example, he gave the say Shanagon outline that I took for the episode we mentioned at the top of the show. Coincidentally, we gave it to someone who spoke Japanese and has lived in Japan, and that person gave us phonetic pronunciations for every single word in it. We still got pronunciation corrections for Japanese. Or our Treaty of White Tangy episode. I looked up documentary footage of New Zealanders talking about it, and then then we imitated that, and we still got corrections about that. So regardless of whether we're talking about uh, accents of English that are not American English, or words in languages that we don't speak, Like, regardless of what steps we take, we still get things wrong. Sadly, we cannot speak We don't speak all the languages, and Bracy has more Spanish training than I do. And when it comes to weird regional pronunciations, what these are actually good for is separating who's from here with who's not from here, and we're not from there. Uh, And we're gonna do our best, but we are seriously always going to get stuff wrong regardless of what effort we take. Yeah, it's just kind of um comes with the package. Somebody suggested asking fans on Twitter, and I was like, this is that's an idea, but that like we don't have a way to figure figure out which responses are legitimate and which ones are people trolling us, and like regional pronunciations can be so wacky, but it's hard to tell the difference. Well, and even when we've done episodes and gotten really irate corrections, they have often come in with like seven different options about they are not all in agreement either, So at that point you're kind of opening a can of worms of like, let's start a Twitter fight over how things are bron again. I don't want to do this podcast to cause violence or unrest or make people's eyears lead with our with our pronunciation. I don't want any of that. Yes, So thank you Samantha for writing, and thank you Hayden for writing, and thank you all the other people who sent us nice corrections, and thank you to the people who sent us main corrections to for taking the time. Uh some of the things that I answered, I'm sure I sounded frustrated and discouraged because I had answered literally fifty mean emails that day. Yeah, by the seventieth time that you've been told in like a three hour period how terrible you are and that like you are killing the universe with your evil, poorly pronounced words, it's hard to maintain, Like, Hey, how you do him? Thanks so much. I'm really I'm really sorry. I'm so I'm actually mortified, frankly still that we got that so spectacularly wrong. But it should not have been there, based on when we were talking about it should have been by hard anyway. So thank you so much to everyone who who correct us on that. Please don't correct us anymore. We got it now. If you would like to learn more about what we talked about today a p M two our website which is missing history dot com, and you will find show notes, including the note where we corrected that pronunciation the day of the episode came out. You can also find a whole archive of everything we've talked about. You can go to our parents company's website, which is how stuff works dot com and find out all kinds of stuff about etiquette. We have a whole collection of etiquette articles if we put etiquette in the search bar. If you want to write to us about things, we're at history Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at missing History. Our tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com. We're on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash miss in history. So come visit us at how stuff works dot com or missed in history dot com and take a look at ask the Best for more on this thousands of other topics because it has stuff works dot com

This episode is brought to you by squar space. Start building your website today at squarespace dot com. Enter offer code History at check out to get teen percent off squarespace. Build it Beautiful. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I am Trazy Wilson and I'm Holly Frying and we have a guest on the show today. We are talking to Dr Elizabeth p Archibald. She is the author of Asked the Past Pertinent and Impertinent Advice from Yesteryear, which started out as a blog just called Asked the Past. If you're not familiar with it, it's this collection of tidbits drawn mostly from medieval and early modern works, mainly written in Europe, with a little brief commentary to And this focus is really because of Elizabeth's focus and interest in this time and place in history. We could foresure talk about advice from the rest of the world and the rest of history too, and if you're interested in that, uh that the same same sorts of things we're going to talk about today also make an appearance in our episode on Say Shanagons Pillow book from the hay On era in Japan, so advice is not limited just to Europe, but that is Elizabeth's focus. So and some of this advice is uh, flat out odd ball. The very idea that somebody ever thought you might need to know or tell someone how to trim your toenails underwater is a little bit strange. There are also some really weird recipes. There's one from five a recipe for making a sort of snail based limbus, which apparently is like a theme through our show Everything is like limbus, and another one from sixteen sixty about making a giant egg as big as twenty eggs out of twenty eggs with other assorted ingredients. It's like a giant Japanese robot situation, but with eggs, where they all come together and make a super egg. There are other how to use in this book that started making sense, but then they take this almost surreal turn. So there's, for example, this six fifty advice for singing. A singer should not sing through the nose. Sure, that makes sense. He must not stammer lest he be incomprehensible, So right, that works too. He must not push with his tongue or lisp, else no one will hardly understand half of what he says, so all this is still common, valid advice. But then it says he should also not close his teeth together, nor open his mouth to wide, nor stretch his tongue out over his lips, nor thrust his lips upward, nor distort his mouth, nor disfigure his cheeks and nose like the long tailed monkey, nor crumple his eyebrows together, nor wrinkle his forehead, nor roll his head or eyes therein round and round, nor win with the same, nor tremble with the lips, et cetera. Doesn't that sound like the most pers nickety music teacher on earth? Yes, somebody needed to put that in a book. And yet, even with these silly and weird and whimsical and sometimes frank dangerous uh bits, like training a cat to fire a pistol, what you shouldn't do that? Or making bird muscles, which is a thirteenth century invention, Sometimes it's reassuring that people have wanted to know how to lose weight and attractive partner and avoid acquaintances they don't want to see for hundreds of years. So John H. Young sark One advises, if you want to avoid an acquaintance looking away and not making eye contact. That it's pretty basic. Yeah, I guess that's Sydney. I hope they don't see me kind of arena. But with all this in mind, I cannot wait to hear your talk with Elizabeth, who pulled all of this crazy stuff together from hundreds of years worth of advice and books. Yeah. We've had several episodes lately that you recorded while I was not in the room, and this one I recorded while you weren't here, So sighting twists. Yes. So today I am talking to Elizabeth p Archibald, who is the author of Ask the Past, Pertinent and Impertinent Advice from Yesteryear, which was also a blog. Thank you so much for agreeing to be on the show, Elizabeth, Thanks for having me on. So. I enjoyed this book a whole lot. It's it's little snippets of advice from the past, along with your commentary and artwork. Uh. It's really funny and sometimes also weirdly touching. And it took me about twice as long to read it as I planned because I kept texting holly hilarious things that I found in it. Um, can you tell us how all of this started. How did you get into this chronicling advice from the past. Yeah. Um, So my academic research deals with the history of education and the history of the book. So I am interested in asking questions like what sort of advice people thought it was worthwhile to put in writing, what kinds of things should be taught by a book rather than by a teacher, and what kinds of things it was a it was possible to learn that way. And so I was teaching a course at the Peaboddy Institute of Johns Hopkins University called how To a History of Instruction, which I designed around the idea that you can look at classic historical texts sort of through the lens of the how To manual, so Plato's republic As how To Manual and Machiavelli and so on. And as part of this course, we've spent a lot of time in the George Peabody Library looking at its rare books collection, and the stuff that I turned up was just great. Um. A sixteenth century book about swimming that included advice on how to trem your toe nails underwater. UM. Seventeenth century conduct manuals, eighteenth century books about how to get rid of rats Um nineteenth century guides to palm Reading UM. And at that point that was when I began posting material to a blog. I just realized that the world needed to know how to trim your tone nails underwater in the sixteenth century. And the blog developed an audience, and soon I started getting questions from around the world, like how should I impress my boss, how should I wash my hair? And it just sort of went from there. So did did you notice any trends in the sorts of things that people thought were worth writing down instructions on how to do? Yeah, it's it's really interesting. Some types of how to manuals and books of advice are really actually pretty similar now to their predecessors from centuries ago. UM, and in some cases the actual advice even sort of remains in circulation. Etiquette handbooks are one category that come to mind. UM. Jovanni de la Caza's Galato is a really foundational text for the history of etiquette, and that's one that was translated and imitated almost immediately. UM, and the advice from that book just sort of stayed in circulation. So instructions about how to blow your nose politely? You know, use a handkerchief and then UM, when you're done blowing your nose, don't open the handkerchief in front of people. This sort of thing. U And that was interesting because um, an early French version of that text was translated into English, and then that became the basis for a set of etiquette rules that were copied out by George Washington when he was sixteen years old or something. So it's sort of interesting how some of these things actually just stick around, you know, responding to universal human desires to know how to blow your nose properly. I guess, um, there are a lot of books like this. They just sort of repeated I used over long periods of time. There's a book by Thomas Lupton from the sixteenth century called A Thousands Notable Things, and that one amazingly continue to be published in new editions into the nineteenth century. UM. And then there are things like UM plenty of the elder suggested violets as a hangover cure. And I when when I posted this on the blog, I actually heard from some people who said, oh, yeah, you know, I've heard that too. I've tried it works, okay, UM or Old Lives tales like the recommendation to put butter on your cat's feet to keep it from running away, or the notion that um, a pregnant woman who takes a step first with her right foot is carrying a boy. These pieces of advice, you know, are around from the ancient world, and they're still sort of sticking with us, So that's interesting to they. And it also seems like the the general perception, not necessarily of people who have really studied medieval life, but the sort of common perception of the medieval world is that it was a gross, dirty, mannerless place. But your book actually has a whole lot of medieval manners in it, Yes, lots of manners um. I think etiquette in particular is sort of an interesting story because people who who know about the history of etiquette think that it sort of began in the Renaissance with Jovanni Dela hasa But in fact, there are a lot of etiquette manual sort of conduct books from the Middle Ages that are articulating these important principles of cleanliness and politeness and things to do and not do at the dinner table, and what types of animals you're allowed to bring into the dining room and what types you're not and all of that stuff. I like the one about I think this was later than that, but the one about leaving a party and not bringing your horse into the hall unless you are instructed. But it's okay to have your horse in the hall, yes, which is excellent advice for a party even today. So let's take a little break from this interview, Holly, I am delighted to learn this idea that you should put butter on your cat's paws when you move so that it doesn't get lost goes way back in history. Yeah. I have heard that advice for hairballs, you know, to help your cat pass a hairball or cough one up, but never as a trekking option. But it seems sort of brilliant and possibly delicious. And the idea is that you put the butter on the cat's paws and let it walk around, leaving buttery tracks in your new home. But then it will lick the butter off it's pause and get the scent of the new place and not run away. That is this idea that apparently has been around a really long time, which somehow you cat lady have not heard. But I cat lady have no, it's pretty ingenious. There's a logic to it. Yeah, although I picture my very chubby cat Mr Burns just sitting there and licking all the butter off anywhere. But we are gonna actually, uh take a brief word from a sponsor before we hear the rest of this charming and really interestingly informative interview. So let's go do that real quick. So for the next portion of this interview, we are going to talk a little bit about Elizabeth's process and making this book, and then we will get into some of the oddity that is involved in all this old advice. So you have so much advice that's been gleaned from so many places and over such a long span of history. What was your process like for winnowing all this down. Yeah, it's such a fun process. I mean really, it's it's just so lateful to be able to look at old books and sort of page through them and um by these fascinating little pieces of advice and kind of um track down leads, you know, if I find a reference to, you know, an ancient technique for pet to removal, and being able to just sort of look around until I find something interesting Um, it's really great, and I'm very lucky to be situated, uh in a in a nice rare books collection at the George Peabody Library, UM, where I can do a lot of that. But then, of course, these days a lot of material has been digitized too, so there's just so much stuff that are fingertips now that it's possible to dig into medieval manuscripts at a moment's notice, which is really exciting. So I found myself being very envious of your time spent in rare book collections while working on this book, because there there's so many cool gems in rare book collections from around the world. Did you have any just awesome discoveries as you were pouring through these very old rare books to work on this Yeah, absolutely, And I mean it's it's such a quirky project to um. You know, it's it's really fun to be able to look at the old books, but it's also sort of funny to be in these very serious libraries and you know, looking at old hangover cures or um, looking in medieval manuscripts to try to find the best illustration of a cat looking its rare end and that sort of thing. So that's that's been fun as well. Well, yeah, and I had I had sort of I had noted almost for the end as an afterthought, that the process of getting artwork to accompany all these things, But that's that's Actually there's as much artwork in the book as there is text. So did you feel like the process for going through all of these uh instructions compared to the process of finding artwork that that went with it or was that a different experience? Well, I mean it was in some ways a different experience. It as much as I wish that each one of these pieces of advice was illustrated, um, because in some cases I think the results would be pretty fascinating, Um, they don't all have illustrations. And yet it was sort of important to me to be able to offer something from the right time period that at least evoked the right technique. And that was a fun process as well, just sort of um, thinking of the right genres of book that would have illustrations of, you know, people with union brows and that sort of thing. So that that in and of itself was just sort of an adventure in rare books collections, one of the things that you wrote about in the introduction to the book was about how it got to the point that it was hard to distinguish sometimes between parodies of instructions and actual instructions because some of the instructions themselves are so weird. Uh. Are there examples of ones that you either left out because they definitely were a parody or ones that are in the book that you're not quite sure if that was an actual instruction or making fun of this whole uh genre of book. Yeah, it's it's so interesting, I mean, it's it is actually very difficult some tends to know how serious the text is, whether the past is sort of pulling your leg a little bit. Um. In some cases it's pretty clear. There are some parody recipes, um, where it's actually pretty clear that it's a parody, so they call for ingredients like, um, goldfinches feet and the sweat of a pebble and these kind of made up things, so that's a good cue. Um. On the other hand, there are recipes that are apparently serious that call for some some pretty strange ingredients. UM. So you know, when you keep seeing the goal of a weasel, you start to wonder at a certain point how serious it is. But Um. In most cases, I think the outlandish ingredients are serious. Um. Then there's the problem of I mean, it's not really a problem that you will encounter texts that just sort of have a funny tone to them, these authors from the past who are being a little bit ridiculous in the presentation of their advice. And I think that is what's going on in one selection from the book on How to Give Birth from the fifteenth century, where the author recommends that women who are in labor should squeam a lot so that everyone hears them and feels petty for them, and then we'll bring them um roast chickens and fine wines in order to make them feel better. You encounter that too, you know, just these sort of funny authors who are enlivening their serious advice with a little bit of playfulness. Circling back to the weird ingredients. As I was reading there, there are lots of things that call for things like pigeon blood and lots of animal blood. Uh, And I was thinking, Okay, that made me make sense if people were eating a lot of pigeon as their diet, that they might have pigeon blood around. But then it would get into okay, and now you need elephant dung, and I would think, how am I getting elephant dung? That doesn't that seems like it would be a little hard to come by. Yeah, And I think what's going on there is, you know, there are some ingredients that you use because you have them on hand. Um. So that can be herbs in the garden, and various types of animal parts and products, um, you know, the beef blood and the weasel sad and this sort of thing, um. And then there are things that I think are supposed to have sort of an aura of strangeness, and you know, you might sort of believe in the efficacy of the recipe more because the ingredients seems a little bit uh out of the ordinary. Um. I think one example of that is recipes that call for unicorn torn um. And nearly all of the recipes that I looked at that involves unicorns horn sort of acknowledge that this is not something that's going to be accessible to everyone. It's expensive. Um. So if you have the means to choires and unicorns for and then go right ahead, and if not, then you can use this other thing, that'll be fine. So some of the advice that's in here seems so bizarre, but I wonder how anybody ever thought that it would work. And one of the things that really jumped out with me at me is the one that was about killing the snakes by luring them with crab cakes and then hitting them with rashes. Yeah right. I have to say that I have not tried this one, um, but if anyone has, let me know how that turned out for you. Um. Yeah. The radish does not seem to be seemed to me to be the most obvious weapon to use against the snake. I have to admit, why are radish? I think it says a large radish. It specifically is a very big radish, but if it's big enough. Another of the oddities that that kind of jumped out of me is too jump back to the idea of manners, is that a lot of these pieces that are about etiquette are simultaneously written in a way that we would consider to be rather rude. So one of the very first pieces of advice is is all about etiquette, and it's about not burping or passing gas while you're dancing with a lady. But the way that it's written, people would think that that's at least at the very least very indelicate by today's standards. Um. Did you often as you were working on this, find this disconnect between advice that holds up, but a way of discussing it that just seems off compared to what we would expect people to talk about that way today. Yeah, and I don't think that that's entirely a coincidence, um, in the case of that particular text. Um. And this is something that I find with how to manuals generally for everyone where read the piece of advice and you sort of scratch your head and you think, I am not so sure about that. Um. You know, what's the point of a how to manual whose advice doesn't actually accomplish what it says it's going to accomplish. Um. There's another one that actually does sort of more than what it is presenting it face value. UM. And that's that's one of them. And I think it's because it's a Latin poem. Actually it's this is this is a poem on dancing advice. Um. And not in the first edition of this poem, but in later editions it includes the sort of ridiculous comic advice about kind of the earthlier aspects of the dance. And so that that piece of advice about um, not eating onions before you go to the dance and not burping, and you know, if you have to sneeze, here's how you should do it. This seems ridiculous, and it sort of is. I mean, I think the intention of that is not purely too explain to incompetent youth how they should behave at a dance, but um, to entertain people who are reading this, you know, it's actually a work of literature. And then in other cases another advice on etiquette, I think sometimes just effective presenting it in a sort of ridiculous way might help to convey the advice a little bit more forcefully, um, sort of make it more more memorable and kind of shame you into behaving properly. Before we talk about some of the modern parallels of all this weird old advice, let's have another reef word from a sponsor. So we're going to close out our interview with Elizabeth by talking about some of the modern parallels to these old advice and etiquette manuals, a couple of which I had not considered at all. And we're also going to hear about one of her favorite pieces of advice, which is one that surprisingly holds up pretty well today, and then stay tuned afterward on talking because we are going to have some pretty important listener mail. When I before I started reading this book, I was sort of expecting it to be like a medieval slash early modern version of like an advice column. But after getting to the end, it feels almost like uh, medieval and early modern version of men's and women's magazines today. It's it's like a collection that that turns into a five hundred year old Cosmo five hundred years from now. What kind of things do you think people are going to be turning to two to figure out the same sort of of weirdness about how we lived at this point. Yeah, that's a great question, I think. Um, it's true some of some of this material does sort of remind me of magazines. Um. I think the reason for that is, you know, it's responding to me that we still have UM so for instance, um, we're still on the eternal quest for brilliant little life hacks. Right, Um, you know how to soap rab how to how to make a cake when you run out of sugar, how to overcome your fear of heights. Um. All of these things you can find in seventeenth century books. Um, that's all stuff that I think we would probably turn to the internet for today, and a lot of categories. I think that, you know, the internet has become our collective how to manual. Yeah, and and now I had not made that kind of action at all, But now that you pointed out, some of the life packs that exist out there are just as absurd as things in the book, or like instead of instead of scrubbing your potatoes, put them in the dishwasher. I think that's the most absurd one that I could think about or think of it at this at this particular moment. Do you have a favorite of all these just delightful gems of odd and sometimes touching advice. You have a favorite one of all of them? Um? Well, I have a lot of favorites. But um, one of my very favorites is about traveling. Um. And this is from a work from the fifteenth century uh by Santobraska, who wrote Died to pilgrimage to the Holy Land, some sort of a common genre, and the advice that he gives about traveling is not completely unique, but I just really like the way that he articulates it. Um. So he says that a traveler should have two bags with him, and one of them should contain a lot of money, and the other one should contain patients. And I think that anyone who has ever gone through an airport in the modern era has encountered that problem. You really need to have your suitcase with patients. And then, of course he else ha says that you need a lot of cured tongue and ginger syrup in order to settle your stomach while you're traveling. But but I really like the suitcase full of patients well, and the ginger to settle your stomach is one of those that carries all the way through until today. I hear people recommend that all the time, exactly. Yeah, So is there anything else that you just you want to make sure that the world knows about your book? I guess one thing I'd like to add is UM just sort of the idea of what a how to manual is um. And I think in the Renaissance, which is sort of from from my perspective at least, kind of the great age of the how to manual Um, the thing that I really love about how to manuals is that they offer a kind of possibility. They sort of make this promise that you can become someone new and it doesn't require divine intervention or you know, a special status that you're born with, or even ten hours of practice. You just need this clever technique that the book is going to teach you, and you know, maybe a few quirky household ingredients. So you can read these books and find out how to have blonde hair, or improve your memory, or become a you know, smooth courtier or lover instead of a bumpkin. And and that's what I think is really appealing about how to two manuals, and it ties back to that idea of men's and women's magazines and life hacks like these things where if you follow these steps, your life will be easier and better exactly, and you know, who knows how many cases it actually played out that way, but there's just such openers and in the genre. So I would like to thank Elizabeth the Archbald again for taking the time to talk to me. Her book asked the past pertinent and impertinent Advice from Yesteryear is out now it is delightful. Her blog is also delightful. Thank you again for talking to us. Do you also, I know you do because you mentioned it already, have some important and interesting listener mail I do. We've gotten some pretty valid uh corrections on the podcast lately. We got a couple of notes after our episode about the Saint KITT's Slave Revolt about how to say Nevus and Antigua, which you say as I just said them, rather than Nevis and Antigua, which is how we said them on the show. But you have traveled there and you heard most people that you spoke to saying Nevis, which is why you presumed that was cool. I did not look it up because I had heard so many people saying them that way. What I have learned since then is that because most of the people I was talking to were ship's staff and ship's crew, and a lot of them their first language was Dutch or maybe Hindi, or maybe they were from the Caribbean and had a like a Caribbean various Caribbean accent. Those accents affected that pronunciation and it didn't quite translate to how we say it in English in America. So that to be fair is one I did not look up. Uh. The other one we have gotten possibly the most email about of any correction ever. In the correction Olympics ranks high. It's quite high. And most of these letters were kind. Thank you for the most of you who were kind. However, most of them were also incorrect. So this is our episode recently about the Texas Revolution, which that we took. We talked about a siege. A lot of the corrections we got our analogous too. If we had done an episode about uh uh Juan Ponce de Leon, and then the entirety of Atlanta wrote to us to say, it's Ponsta Leon right, which is how there's for those of you who don't know, there is a famous road here in Atlanta. Our offices in fact are on it, which everybody here calls Ponst Leon right, which when I first moved here it made my stomach hurt. But right, that's not how you say his name went in Rome, but you know, centuries later that is how people say the name of the road that was named after him. So what we should have said d in our siege episode about the Texas Revolution, we should have called it the siege of Beijar. We're going to talk about why with two different pieces of mail. The first of them is from my friend Hayden from college, and he uh, I'm not gonna read the whole thing because it was a note to me, not to the podcast, and he said Texas history, particularly the period of the revolution, can be a real mess, so it was nice to hear a clear summary of the events. I have just a couple of comments. First, the pronunciation of Behar when speaking of the village of bejart As is as it was generally known during the colonial and republic periods. The generally accepted pronunciation is Beihar. In modern Texas, the city of San Antonio is in Bear County, and the residents they are pronounced it Bear. You also mentioned that Texas independence was declared March first, thirty six. It was actually declared March second, which was Sam Houston's birthday. I don't know where the second air came from, so that was that was Hayden on how to pronounce Behar. I also got a great email from Samantha. Samantha says, I've been listening to the podcast for years, hoping to hear something that could spark and excuse to write in and I finally have one, but unfortunately, instead of a cute story, it's a slight correction. I appreciate your caveat at the top of the cast regarding the improper pronunciation of the rold are at the end of bey heart, something few people who did not learn the correct malformation to pronounce that particular sound as a child can accomplish. However, the rest of the word is also mispronounced, and then she has like this slanty face in moodicon with the like slightly frown email. I have to start by admitting I am not a native Spanish speaker or a linguist, but I did grow up in San Antonio, and I took Spanish and German in high school. And the proper pronunciation of Bear County, where San Antonio is located, was discussed several times as an example of the influence of the linguistic traditions of the region's main cultural groups on our modern pronunciations of traditional words and names. The original word by heart, being Spanish, was most likely announced behar, treating the the x like a J to sound like ye, yea or ha. We can see this in the original pronunciation of Texas as Taijas, and in the correct pronunciation of Wahaka, a word I love to see non Spanish speakers struggle to pronounce in Mexican restaurants. My language teacher always explained that that beijar pronounced beijar softened to bear under the influence of Germanic language traditions, which came in with large numbers of German immigrants to the area, settling towns like Fredericksburg and New Bronzels. And I should have looked up how to say that before I read this letter, but I didn't. In fact, until about thirty years ago, a form of German was still spoken by elderly native born residents of these towns, much like Creole is still spoken in small parts of Louisiana, and some people even thought the word was actually German in origin but rewritten in Spanish. I think the memory of this story, as well as spending a lot of time in St. Louis and New Orleans, where the mix of French, English, Spanish, and Native American languages have created some very interesting pronunciation standards that are seemingly at odds with traditional correct pronunciations turned into a dilettant fascination with the evolution of language. Uh. And then she actually then she actually recommends um an audiobook of the Great Courses, The Story of Human Language, which is a full semester's worth of classroom lectures about the evolution of language. Um. And then she says that said she was really great that we did the episode. So here's what happened. I looked up how to say beijar at four vo, and we got the Spanish version. We got the Spanish version thinking it would be more correct to the place and time. We were talking about the Spanish language pronunciation of bejar at four vo. When we looked at it was wrong, Like it was frankly wrong. Um. And because you know T e x a s has pronounced Texas Yenglish and and M e x i ceo was pronounced in Mexico and English. And the fact that I have never studied Spanish beyond I think a semester in third grade with yeah or maybe a quarter. It was a very small amount of of third grade Spanish, where we mostly learned numbers in the alphabet. Uh. It did not occur to me that that was wrong. So I'm sorry I messed that up. However, everyone who angrily wrote to us, Uh, we got an email that literally started, um, it's pronounced bear, like, don't don't, don't write to anyone like that. It would not actually have been correct to have called that town bear, but it also was not correct to call it Bexar, which we should have called it Behar. And just as a public service announcement, Uh, most of you were nice. Thank you so much for most of you being nice, But like, just in general, as a general rule, if you're if you're writing to anyone in the world to correct something they have done, imagine that you yourself have just made a large and and and irritating an upsetting air in front of literally thousands of people. Kind Of imagine how you would feel about that before you write your email to yell at them about it, and know that you're one of thousands of people doing something. Yeah, we got literally hundreds of emails. My my, I mean, I don't. People are welcome to couch their complaints anyway they want. I'm not there the boss of them. My thing that is always like when people start something like that and it's my ears bled and I cried and I'm like, okay, Nobody on this podcast is like, let's make some mirrors bleed today. We're going to really rock this. You know, I don't want to hurt anybody with mispronunciation. It is an accident, always right. Neither of us are ever like I don't care, just saying, however, you well, and to start of give you a little behind the scenes, behind the scenes of stuff you missed in history class. The level of effort that we take to find correct pronunciations just does not correspond to a reduction in how many corrections we get about it. It does regardless of what steps we take. Like for example, he gave the say Shanagon outline that I took for the episode we mentioned at the top of the show. Coincidentally, we gave it to someone who spoke Japanese and has lived in Japan, and that person gave us phonetic pronunciations for every single word in it. We still got pronunciation corrections for Japanese. Or our Treaty of White Tangy episode. I looked up documentary footage of New Zealanders talking about it, and then then we imitated that, and we still got corrections about that. So regardless of whether we're talking about uh, accents of English that are not American English, or words in languages that we don't speak, Like, regardless of what steps we take, we still get things wrong. Sadly, we cannot speak We don't speak all the languages, and Bracy has more Spanish training than I do. And when it comes to weird regional pronunciations, what these are actually good for is separating who's from here with who's not from here, and we're not from there. Uh, And we're gonna do our best, but we are seriously always going to get stuff wrong regardless of what effort we take. Yeah, it's just kind of um comes with the package. Somebody suggested asking fans on Twitter, and I was like, this is that's an idea, but that like we don't have a way to figure figure out which responses are legitimate and which ones are people trolling us, and like regional pronunciations can be so wacky, but it's hard to tell the difference. Well, and even when we've done episodes and gotten really irate corrections, they have often come in with like seven different options about they are not all in agreement either, So at that point you're kind of opening a can of worms of like, let's start a Twitter fight over how things are bron again. I don't want to do this podcast to cause violence or unrest or make people's eyears lead with our with our pronunciation. I don't want any of that. Yes, So thank you Samantha for writing, and thank you Hayden for writing, and thank you all the other people who sent us nice corrections, and thank you to the people who sent us main corrections to for taking the time. Uh some of the things that I answered, I'm sure I sounded frustrated and discouraged because I had answered literally fifty mean emails that day. Yeah, by the seventieth time that you've been told in like a three hour period how terrible you are and that like you are killing the universe with your evil, poorly pronounced words, it's hard to maintain, Like, Hey, how you do him? Thanks so much. I'm really I'm really sorry. I'm so I'm actually mortified, frankly still that we got that so spectacularly wrong. But it should not have been there, based on when we were talking about it should have been by hard anyway. So thank you so much to everyone who who correct us on that. Please don't correct us anymore. We got it now. If you would like to learn more about what we talked about today a p M two our website which is missing history dot com, and you will find show notes, including the note where we corrected that pronunciation the day of the episode came out. 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