The Breakfast Rule

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We want to share a little behind-the-scenes thing from our other jobs producing, wait,

wait, don't tell me, it's something called the breakfast rule.

We're going to talk about this with us, our host Peter Segal, who you all know, and

Lorna White, who is our technical director.

Hi.

This is very exciting to be on the air with Lorna.

This rarely...

No, this never happened.

This never happened, unless it's a mistake.

Oh, well, there you go.

This isn't a mistake, but it could have been.

It could turn into one.

Yeah, it could turn into a mistake.

Very quickly.

Lorna, I should say, is with us because when it comes to avoiding mistakes that might

get the show canceled, Mike thinks of Lorna as the last line of defense.

It's true.

It's true.

If you're comfortable with that description.

I'm comfortable with being the mom of the show.

I'm not comfortable with it because I don't know what it means.

What is Lorna defending us from?

If there's ever anything that is on the line, and we are still uncertain about whether

or not it's going to offend the audience, Lorna is often one of the last, if not the

last person to hear the show before it goes out.

So if her radar goes off, then we know we have to address it.

That way, she is the last line of defense.

We have this rule called the breakfast rule, which is how we decide whether or not something

is too gross to go in the air.

If you were eating breakfast while listening to whatever story, how grossed out would you

be?

Recently, there was a question on the show that made the show, but there was a part I was

editing this.

And there was a part that happened at the end that I found to be the funniest part.

But it also felt like I don't know if we can put this on the radio.

So first, let's just take a couple of minutes, we'll listen to what ran on the radio.

This is the edited version.

Peter, times are stressful.

We know that, but the New York Times has offered advice for achieving, quote, nirvana, just

do what?

Subscribe to the New York Times.

No.

Well, I'll take it.

It's okay.

Not only do you achieve absolute inner peace, you also find out if you have polyps.

Get a colonoscopy?

Yes.

Go get a colonoscopy.

A writer was finally forced by his advancing age to get a colonoscopy, and he discovered

that they're actually wonderful, a secret known only to all the people who have gotten

a colonoscopy.

Why do you think we're smiling all the time?

I'm sorry.

I've had two.

I do not agree with this sentiment.

Oh, wow.

I like the being knocked out and not being awake for it, but have you prepped for a colonoscopy?

Here's the thing.

Most people who enjoy colonoscopy, it's all about the drugs.

They give you the procedure.

You're out.

You wake up.

You feel good.

It's okay.

You feel good for the rest of the day.

This guy even loved the prep.

That's when, yes, that's when you have to drink gallons of horse laxative until your

organs liquefy and exit your body.

He says, quote, it was as liberating as a spa day.

He called it, quote, my diarrhea vacation.

Oh, my God.

And I will admit it is kind of fun to discover that your own body is a clown car.

I had no idea I would all fit in there.

You know, people get on the New York Times for so many, like, political, left-wing, right-wing

things, and through the support.

This is the last stroke.

Really?

I'm not interested in their opinions on colonoscopies.

Yeah, this guy is going to be so amazed if he ever takes an actual vacation.

You mean I don't have to spend all day lying next to the toilet?

This Wisconsin Dettles is heaven on earth.

That's fine.

For me, the D word is always on the line.

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

Whenever that shows up, I'm never sure I want to hear it, but okay, so I'm going to play

now what we cut, and it'll just pick up at the very end of what you heard, and you'll

see what Wisconsin Dettles is heaven on earth.

Of course, he got into trouble because my diarrhea vacation is the trademark for carnival

cruises.

And they got mad.

I had neurovirus once.

Really?

I would not describe it as vervana.

No.

It was quite painful.

Well, you did say that like a character in a film noir movie.

I had neurovirus once.

It was fantastic.

Oh, for the days.

My salad days were salad little league came out of my box.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

So, Lorna, would that have crossed your line?

Yes.

I think it would have, based on how visual it is.

Oh, it does paint a picture, yeah.

Salad coming out of your butt.

It's a little too visual.

I will say that it was fun for me to listen to that because I remember the material that

ended up in the air because it ended up in the air.

But my mind just erases everything that happens during a taping usually.

So I had no idea what was going to come next and what was it that would, that finally

ended up crossing the line, the breakfast rule.

And it cracked me up that it was Nagin's long walk to that remarkable destination of salad

coming out of one's butt.

It was.

So that's what it was.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can see that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can see how that would be a problem, especially if people were eating salad for breakfast.

Salad coming out of your butt.

I think I would have kept that if I read it again.

Really?

I think so.

Yeah.

I think I would have kept it.

What do you think?

Lorna, do you think I would have kept it?

I would have questioned it.

You would have kept it.

I would have questioned it heavily.

I like what we've done here that we, so what, what we did is because we, because one

time we removed someone talking about salad coming out of their butt, we have now successfully

added 10 additional, 10 additional times saying salad coming out of a butt.

Right.

Into the NPR archive.

It's true.

It'll be there.

If you have a library of Congress forever.

Yeah.

Okay, so in conclusion, this is the breakfast rule, salad coming out of your butt.

That is too much.

We just set it again.

Yeah, sorry about that.

And I'll just one more time, salad coming out of your butt.

You can use this in your own life, I think, to decide if something belongs there or not.

If you're dating someone and you can't, you can't eat breakfast without being disgusted

by the thought of them.

I think it's time to break up.

That person would violate the breakfast rule.

I know some people that could be talking about me.

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This is How To Do Everything, I'm Ian.

And I'm Mike.

If you have a question for us, you can send it to us at our email.

Our email address is how to at npr.org.

Autumn's has a question.

Autumn's what can we help you with?

Yes.

So I have a very unique name and I'm wondering how to, you know, kind of change it to make

it proper to the situation, I guess.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess we just said your name.

Autumn's, but I think for the purpose of this question, we should have you spell it

for us.

Yeah.

So it's autumn like the season, AUTUM in within apostrophe F.

The apostrophe is part of your name.

It is.

So my first name obviously is Autumn's and my middle name is Hope.

So it's Autumn's Hope.

Oh, that's nice.

That's.

Yeah.

My dad, you know, decided to make it a super easy one, right?

Wait.

So what did teachers call you when you're in school?

Yeah.

I always go by autumn just because it's less confusing.

But every time I got handed a report card or now any time I do anything, legal people get

very confused and they look at me and say, oh, hang on, there's a mistake and I have

to go, no, no, no, no, the mistake was made at my birth certificate, you know, jokingly.

So if I were, do you know, so if I were writing about something that was yours, if I were

talking about your car, say, would I write AUTUM in apostrophe S, apostrophe S car?

That is exactly my question, that's exactly why I contacted you guys because I've always

wanted to know that since it is inherently possessive, but of my middle name, how do

I go about making it possessive of other things?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Do you have, do you have any siblings?

I do and all their names are normal.

No, really?

Like what?

Yeah, yeah, really.

So my mom wanted to name me Autumn Rain and my dad thought that that was too hippie.

So he put the apostrophe S instead because that's left weird, I don't know.

Okay.

Autumn, so Autumn's hope was then, that was the non-hippie choice.

Apparently, although it didn't work because I ended up a little too hippie for his

taste too.

What are your siblings' names?

Yeah, Clinton, Edward and then Kimberly Diane.

I feel like those are just, those are the exact opposite of your name.

Right.

I don't know.

There's a mist opera.

You could have been Clinton's despair.

You know, the perfect person for this is Mary Norris.

Norris is spelled by the way, there's no apostrophe before the S.

Mary Norris has been a copy editor and proofreader with the New Yorker magazine for decades.

So Mary, we just got off the phone with someone named Autumn's and that is spelled Autumn

like the season apostrophe S.

The apostrophe is part of the name.

First of all, can we just get your response to this as a name?

Her name is a possessive?

Yes.

That is correct.

It is.

That seems like a mistake.

That's what Autumn's would tell you too and she's had to tell everybody that it's not

a mistake.

Oh my.

It's interesting because the world of the web and digital world reject apostrophe every

chance it gets, but it wouldn't make sense to spell it without the apostrophe either.

Would it?

I think she should change her name.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, let me ask you this.

If she didn't change her name, just grammatically, if I wanted to talk about something that

belonged to her, would I do Autumn apostrophe S, apostrophe S?

Autumn's?

Yeah.

Well, I think that would just make it worse, don't you?

It will.

What would you do?

Yeah.

What I would do?

I would draw the line at the double apostrophe S.

Okay.

I mean, you can drive yourself crazy with this stuff.

Can I ask you, Mary?

So we're coming to you as our kind of ultimate authority on this, right?

And you're in a similar situation as we are in where you don't have an answer.

Who do you turn to?

I turn to the person who was my boss at the New Yorker at the Copy Desk, her name is Ann

Goldstein.

I turn to her.

Okay.

Can we conference her in?

Could we bring her into this call and see?

I wouldn't know how to do that.

I could probably figure it out.

Hello, Ann?

Oh, hi.

Okay.

Ann.

Hi, Mary.

All right.

And we have called you here with a specific purpose.

Mary says, you're the person above her that she calls when she has a grammar question.

Is that right?

Yeah.

I mean, I don't consider myself above her, but she would call it, yeah.

Okay.

Office hierarchy.

Anyway.

Well, yes.

Office hierarchy.

That's right.

Great.

Okay.

That name, someone with that name, on their birth certificate, autumn apostrophe S.

Okay.

It's not a clear, clear, well, she insists that it's not.

I think people haven't think it is.

Yeah.

But no.

So if you were going to write it out about, you're going to say, who's car is that?

And you know, it's autumn's car.

How would you spell that?

Oh, that's really a trick question.

Mm-hmm.

I guess I will put another apostrophe on.

Yeah.

Well, the thing is, if you put another apostrophe S, it looks like a typo.

Well, it may look like a typo, but is that not the right answer?

You could argue it either way, if it chooses a matter.

I guess it's a New Yorker, we would put apostrophe S, because that was, we made a ruling

about the apostrophe S at a certain point.

Okay.

So what's the consensus?

Do we have consensus here?

I can see.

I know.

We don't.

The consensus is that anything goes.

All right.

Thank you both.

Mary, thanks again.

It's no interesting.

It's very, that's a very new question of the past.

I'm glad you sprung it on me.

Oh.

Sprung it on me.

Oh, hold on a sec.

Mary, is it sprung or sprung?

Which is it?

Sprung sprung.

Sprung sprung.

Oh my gosh.

You know what we should do?

It seems like, it seems like the available punctuation marks are not sufficient for

Autumn's unique needs.

We should make her a new punctuation mark.

Something she can use whenever she needs to indicate that she has possession of something.

Something is hers.

We're going to bring up a punctuation expert to try and help us.

This is Keith Houston.

Keith, when was the last time we got a new punctuation mark?

Oh, the last successful punctuation mark, I guess, was probably the exclamation mark.

It looks like it was around about the 14th century, but it's not really clear.

It's not really clear where it came from.

I think there's a suggestion that it comes from an exclamation of joy in Latin, which

was EO, so I-O, and you can imagine how with maybe the ice ends up above the O, perhaps

the O gets smaller and smaller until it turns into a dot.

At this point, this is where, in the mid 14th century, this is where it was first proposed

and it seemed to become more common into the 15th century, and then, after that point,

you're pretty close to, well, that's really printing.

That's when printing appears, and so it was lucky enough to appear at the point at which

it could be standardized.

Okay.

So, bottoms.

First of all, let me just, as someone who has looked at punctuation throughout history,

what is your reaction to autumn's name?

It is a bold choice for a name, I think, on the part of her parents, and I can see her

problem.

Yeah, it's not an easy thing to deal with, especially when you're dealing with possessives

or plurals.

Yeah.

And your name ends in a positive VS.

So if we were to come up with a new punctuation mark to something just for autumn, where would

we begin in creating a new punctuation mark?

First of all, you have to describe what the mark needs to do, and then figure out what

it's going to look like.

So, I don't know, imagine, perhaps we want a mark which looks like, I don't know, a

plus symbol with a diagonal line through it or something, and this indicates something

belonging to autumn, for example.

If you're lucky, that might already exist.

So there is this organization called the Unicode Consortium, and this is where we get

really exciting.

We get to talk about big NGOs, and so the Unicode Consortium has responsibility, basically

for standardizing the set of characters that computers can exchange.

And in doing so, they, more or less, they don't control language, that's far too strong

with putting it, but they are the final gatekeepers before a new mark of punctuation or a letter

or a number or any other symbol can be used on the majority of computers around the world.

So you need to design your mark, you need to describe what it's going to do, and if you

want to be able to type it on anyone's computer, if you want autumn's special mark of punctuation

to be available everywhere, you have to convince the Unicode Consortium that it's a good idea.

And they have a whole set of criteria, you have to write this little formal document, send

it off to them, you perhaps they'll call you to ask to discuss it.

And if you're lucky, the Unicode Technical Committee will decide to include it.

And at some point in the future, it then becomes ratified, it becomes a standard mark.

And then if you're further, if you're even more lucky, then all of the companies that

care about what Unicode say, like Google and Facebook and Apple, all the companies

that actually control the text that we can see and we can type, perhaps they decide

to add it to their fonts, and they can do that because Unicode has said, this is a standard

mark.

Okay, okay, but it starts with Unicode.

Yes.

And it ends with Unicode in some ways.

Is there somewhat at Unicode, you recommend we call to start this process?

Mark Davis was one of the founding members of Unicode, he would be the perfect person

to talk to about this.

I think it's amazing just that the person in charge of exclamation marks and question

marks is named Mark.

I think that's an amazing thing that's happened.

I've been writing about punctuation for 15 or 20 years now and I have not thought of

that previously.

I just avoid this in myself.

Okay, all right, Skyler has managed to arrange it, Mark Davis is on the line with us

now.

Hey, Mark.

Hi, how you doing?

Great, great.

Can I pitch you a punctuation mark?

Well, go ahead, we'll see what happens.

All right.

Here you go.

All right.

Yeah, we have a listener who we need a new punctuation mark to denote possession that

we would like it to be part of Unicode, part of the universal system.

We all use as soon as possible, can we do that?

That would be very hard to do.

And I can outline some of the reasons why it gets very tricky to do.

But the key issue is that you have to really show a lot of usage.

Of course, it becomes a candidate for inclusion.

It's kind of an emergency.

Well, there are very few character emergencies that we've had.

Okay.

I'll give you an example of one is when there's a new currency symbol.

And those tend to be things that are emergencies.

Another one was when the Japanese Emperor died, because in the Japanese calendar, the era

name for each emperor is a new symbol.

And then that gets encoded.

And that was something we rushed out very quickly so that it added to all of the operating

systems that they could actually show people dates with the right era symbol.

And as I said, currency symbols are another one where those would constitute emergencies.

So if our collar bottoms, if she were to become the emperor of Japan, it's possible then

that you would come up with a special punctuation or a special character for her.

I can say with almost 100% occurrence that if she became the emperor of Japan, that she

could get her symbol into the code.

All right.

Okay.

Well, there's a path forward, even if it's an unlikely path.

Okay.

There you go.

Well, that does it for this week's show.

Would you learn, Ian?

Well, I learned that maybe I was not, I didn't think creatively enough when naming my children.

Okay.

I felt for whatever reason, whatever shortcoming, I felt confined to the 26 letters of the alphabet.

Yeah.

When really there was all that punctuation I could have played with.

That's true.

When you think about it, when you're typing on your phone, there's a button you can push.

And that opens up a whole nother keyboard full of opportunity right there.

Yeah.

Meet my daughter, hashtag Jennifer.

Yeah.

This is my son.

It's an unpronounceable super strong password.

Peter.

Yes.

Peter, what did you learn today?

Oh.

I learned about what it is that triggers, at least one of the things that could trigger

our breakfast rule, which is foods remaining in their original form, emerging from the human

body.

Oh.

Right.

Right.

And what do you have?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

The reason I-

Christine salad.

Right.

The reason I agree with the decision to cut Nagin's joke is that the image in my head was

actual salad in its leafy form, multicolored, you know, and that's what I thought of.

And that's a distressing image in my head and so that's why I agreed, you know, to

with your decision not to broadcast it.

Yeah.

I guess like digestion is the editing of the body.

In a weird way.

Yeah.

I want to- you don't want to see it in this raw form.

How to do everything is produced by Skylar Swenson with Technical Direction from Lauren

White.

Our interns this week are Ann and Mary, who are joining us just for this one week from

the New Yorker.

Send us your questions, whatever they may be, to our email address.

That's how to at npr.org.

I'm Ian.

And I'm Mike.

Thanks.

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