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The "show open topic" for this week's Car Talk, according to the show's web page, is "Tom and Ray translate the grunts of mechanics".

It starts like this:

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In fact, Alexandra Sellers' Spoken Cat was published a dozen years ago, and similarly, the Newsweek article about it (Lucy Howard and Carla Koehl, "Talk The Talk"), ran on May 5, 1997. But Tom and Ray are not broadcasting from a parallel space-time continuum. Rather, this is an "encore edition", which apparently means that the jokes — and the automobile repair advice? — are 12 years old.

Luckily, animal communication, like car repair, is an evergreen. And so is Tom and Ray's glossary of car mechanic's noises. (Since they're grease monkeys themselves, they're entitled to make what might seem, if it came from another NPR personality, like a snooty elitist joke about the subhuman nature of the lower orders.)

You can listen to the whole thing in context from the show's web page linked above (at least for the next week), or download it as an mp3 file here (I think that should be a somewhat durable link).

Here's the first one.

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As you can hear, the performance is, shall we say, subtly variable.

And the official translation? "Hi, how are you?"

Here's the next one:

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Ray (or is it Tom, I've lost track at this point) guesses "I think I know what's wrong with this car", but that's "going too deep" — it turns out to mean "Fine, thanks".

The next guess is wrong too:

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But then they get in sync:

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And stay that way for a while:

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Though another communicative failure comes up at the end:

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Tom and Ray get more laughs out of this than most students of non-verbal communication do; but they've hit on the serious essence of the problem: such signals generate a sense of recognition (if not always a belly-laugh) when prcessed in context, but they're very hard to understand in the abstract, because of their almost complete lack of referential anchoring.

[In other inter-species communication news, the Bowlingual is back, and now comes with an answering machine. Like I said, evergreen.

And here's today's Non Sequitur:

…just to remind us that interspecies misunderstanding is not all one-sided.]

July 27, 2009 @ 5:43 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Animal communication, Humor

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