Ben Schott

It's called The Law and Language of Schoolchildren.

And I remember reading it because it was on my parents' bookshelves.

And this husband and wife team in the late 1950s went from playground to playground across the United Kingdom, and they interviewed children about their playground games.

So skipping games, eeny, meeny, miny, moe, hopscotch, all of these things.

Now, you might say, well, who cares?

This is literally childish.

I mean, like, why does this matter?

And the reason why it matters and the reason why I coined this term Significa is this is things that are normally overlooked.

And actually, they tell us a tremendous amount about a time and a culture.

These words will often just disappear and they will never be used again.

And if you don't write them down...

it's gone.

So there's a language of black cab drivers in London, the London cabbie.

And a lot of this language is fading away because what was a kind of white working class, small socio-led group of drivers, there's now huge diversity and Uber's taking over and this kind of thing.

So the old Cockney rhyming slang and some of the old terms are fading out.

So if you don't write them down and collect them, it just disappears.

And on the other side of the equation, I think

If you really understand how people communicate, you also understand how they think.

And I think there's a really interesting way of diving in using language as the key to unlock thinking and experience and how professions operate.

So every family has a sort of idiolect or a sociolect.