How could there ever be a better example of the Internet’s ability to unite people in a singular interest?
By now, it’s almost a sure thing that everyone reading this has heard of the yanny vs. laurel phenomenon, which on Wednesday of last week became so “viral” that it spread like wildfire all over the U.S. and captured nearly everyone’s attention (whether young or old, white or black, rich or poor or whatever). It was remarkable; in the space of less than 12 hours almost every American became aware of the deal and had an opinion one way or the other.
But in case you were stuck in the northern part of Siberia until the moment before you read this and aren’t aware of the yanny-laurel outbreak, it’s about an audio clip allegedly taken from vocabulary.com of a man saying the word “laurel.” What’s wild about it is that many people who listen to the clip hear “yanny” (me included).
The clip supposedly became viral after a high school student in Flowery Branch, Ga., went to the website for “laurel” and heard “yanny.” The Internet took it from there, and the thing gained legs like a cyber-centipede.
I can’t think of anything that has so uniformly grabbed America’s attention other than the Challenger explosion and 9-11 – and those both before occurred well before the term “viral” became a household word referring to trendy Internet sensations. Some people are comparing yanny vs. laurel to a dress color thing from several years ago, but this one is clearly far more widespread, because I didn’t even know about the dress thing until last week when someone brought it up during a yanny-laurel conversation.
As the day progressed, yanny vs. laurel was bandied about in just about every office, classroom and living room around the country, and eventually ended up on national evening news broadcasts. I even saw a hilarious use of it on the pre-game show of TNT’s NBA playoffs telecast that night, when host Ernie Johnson Jr. and commentators Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith got into the yanny-laurel spirit.
When they played the clip into the guys’ earphones, Barkley insisted he heard “donut.”
They ran it a couple more times and Barkley kept hearing “donut.” Shaq took the opportunity to insult Charles, but it turned out that Chuck really was hearing donut because producers were feeding that word into his earphones.
When they turned off his donut feed, Barkley heard laurel (Shaq was yanny and the other two were also laurel).
While it’s fun to try to analyze why the results differ from person to person, it’s definitely not related to gender or age. A friend of mine’s family is a prime example of that, because he and his young daughter hear laurel and his wife and their young son hear yanny.
After 48 hours of being yanny-laurel being posted on the Houston Herald Facebook page, the results showed 86 people favoring laurel and 63 hearing yanny; that’s about 57-percent laurel to 42-percent yanny. For the record, there were also 12 people hearing “both” and 16 changing their minds from one to the other. In addition, there were five votes for “Harry,” three for “Jerry” and one each for “jelly,” “Yuri,” “yes” and “thank you.”
There was even one “neither,” which I guess means the person might have heard Harry, Jerry, jelly, Yuri, yes, thank you or something else, but didn’t share that information.
Just for fun, I conducted my own unofficial (and entirely unscientific) survey via an email sent to numerous people, including government and court officials, business owners and managers, relatives and lots of other random friends and acquaintances. The results there were pretty much opposite, with 58-percent favoring yanny and 42-percent laurel.
The bottom line is, there’s no right or wrong answer (although I can’t imagine why anyone would say they hear “laurel” when the clip clearly screams “yanny”).
As the phenomenon spread, vocabulary.com hopped aboard the bandwagon and created a definition for yanny: “A word or phrase that is capable of distracting the entire Internet for at least 24 hours.” The site says yanny can even be used as a slang term: “when you ‘drop a yanny,’ you start a contentious debate on some type of public forum.”
Incredible.
I’ve even seen yanny spelled “yanni” in some online posts and heard a person or two pronounce it “yonny.” But to set the record straight, this isn’t not some eclectic musician’s name or something like that, it’s just fictitious word with a classic short “a” sound and a “y” at the end.
Anyway, this whole thing – to me – clearly illustrates how God made humans kind of like snowflakes, in that no two are alike in the way they look or think. Popular Canadian folk music artist Bruce Cockburn (pronounced “co-burn” for those of you not familiar with him) summed that up pretty well in a passage in his 1984 song, “Making Contact”:
So many ways to understand
One for every woman and man
Been that way since the world began
A friend of mine said life is best that way because if everyone thought the same way, “it would be pretty boring.”
Roger that.
So, the entire nation was brought together last week by a singular issue, but it wasn’t “hard news” like North Korea, ISIS, a catastrophic flood or anything else that might be considered “important.” Instead, the unifying medium was a silly debate about a trivial and inconsequential audio clip. Welcome to 2018.
The White House even got into the spirit by producing a downright funny yanny-laurel video (if you haven’t seen it, Google it, because it’s one of a kind).
By the way, did you see that picture of the word that circulated later last week? So, did you see yanny or laurel?
Sheesh.
Doug Davison is a writer, photographer and newsroom assistant for the Houston Herald.
Email: ddavison@houstonherald.com.
Mark Tinkler, founder and chief technology officer of vocabulary.com, said the original audio recording comes from an opera singer contracted to record English language words for the website. Vocabulary.com previously worked with about eight professional opera singers to record every word in English over a six-month period because they are fluent in International Phonetic Alphabet, Tinkler said.
In somewhat of a disappointment to the many people who heard “Yanny” in the clip, the actual word recorded in the original clip is laurel, defined as a “wreath worn on the head, usually as a symbol for victory.”
But that doesn’t mean the viral sensation didn’t stump Tinkler, who said he’s heard both “Yanny” and “Laurel” after listening to the original clip on his website. “It’s just as much of a fierce debate in my office as it is anywhere else,” he said.
