00:00:00 Speaker 1: M what is that an acorn and acorn? What do you what do you think when you hear someone say acorn? Like? Where? What? I Probably I don't know if I know what that was. On this episode of the bar Grease Podcast, we're going to get a PhD in acrons, or some of you might say a corns. We'll deep dive into acron biology with renowned wildlife biologist Dr Craig Harper, learning some fascinating stuff that every woodsman should know, and we'll explore how we use language every day to define cultural identity with Dr Daniel Rupe, will debunk the American myth of rugged individualism as we discuss the value and the preservation of regional culture. Put on your seatbelts, boys, this is a wine the road of biology and social science. As we search for the significance of acorns. One of the things I'm most pleased with is your correct pronunciation of the acorn fruit. Music to my ears, rr Harper. My name is Clay Nukelem and this is the bear Grease Podcast where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Before you get too indoctrinated, I want you to take a second and note the way that you pronounced the word spelled a c O r in. Say it out loud and remember it. It means something. I've always been interested in acrens. I've looked for them relentlessly since I was a boy. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized there was national tension about the way the word was pronounced. I've been in the arena, so to speak, on this debate for some time. I imagine it's kind of like being born into a war. You didn't know you were fighting, and maybe you were even the one instigating it, but you didn't know why acorns are important. I've always felt this. But we're gonna discuss the puzzle piece they play in acquiring wild meat, specifically for white tailed deer, but I think we'll find other reasons why they're important. In I cooked bear cracklins for Andrew Zimmer on his show Bizarre Foods on the Travel chat All. The episode was titled the Ozarks. Somehow the pronunciation of acorns came up. Heart bears are acorn fed, so when you see a bear fat. Can you see an acorn? Same stuff that is sweet and clean? Oh my gosh, that's those acorns or acorns as you would say. I was trying to fit in and be one of the guys. As I listened to this audio, I have to ask myself, why why do I care how someone pronounces a word? Almost a decade later, I'd find myself in the heat of incoming fire from none other than my own dear pal, Stephen Ranella of meat Eater. In this clip put on Instagram by Steve, he's got his back to the camera with his children by his side, and they're watching a video that I made about oaks and acorns. He's pounding the table and emphatically telling his kids how to pronounce the word acorn correctly. I could only watch and gasp, as I'm certain many of you did as well. Favorite but which means highly valued life? What a hill billy? Come on, bro, I'm trying to understand what all this means. I did a little experiment at a get together the other day. I pulled aside three couples from different states, handed them an acorn, and asked them how they pronounced the word. I was pretty surprised at a few of their answers. Okay, I'm gonna take something out of my pocket. I'm gonna show it to you and you just tell me what you would call it. Okay, So what is that? An acorn? An acren? Okay? What is this? An acorn? And acorn? Yeah? Where are you from? South Dakota? South Dakota? Is that normal in South Dakota to say acorn? Have you been indoctrinated by Southerners? I have? Now, where are you from South Dakota? So you were born raised in South Dakota? Like, without a doubt, acorn? What do you What do you think when you hear someone say acorn? Like where? I probably I don't know if i'd know what that was. Yeah, it's not gonna hurt you. Acorn definitely an acorn, acorn, not an acren. I'm not a clay because I've heard you correct people and I deliberately try to say acorn. Now, do you really what would you have said before? Though? Yeah? I think I would have said acorn acorn? Really, I think it would have being like a blend of one of the other. So tell us where you're from. Casey, Oh, I grew up in Louisiana, Deep South, So you would say a corn though from New Orleans, Louisiana. Yes, sir, because it is a seat. Oh are incorrect? Acre, because that's what we called that. Yeah, where are you from? Southwest? It's an acorn and acorn? Would say acorn? Really, you'd say acorn? Where are you from? Where? Where we're trying? That would be New York? Where did you grow up? Florida? But St. Petersburg, which was a lot of Ohio and Michigan. What do you think when you hear somebody say acorn? I think they're from the south. Absolutely. Do you think this is like a hillbilly? No, I just think they're from the south South, as they said in North Carolina, they'd say acre. I'm still trying to understand what all this means. Sharon McCrumb is a New York Times bestselling author from Southern Appalachia. She has a knack for celebrating the history and folklore of the Southern Highlands in her writing. Like me, she's particular about the pronunciation of words, specifically the word Appalachian, and she considers it a non negotiable. In this clip, she gives the reason why semantics are important and how they tell a bigger story. But first take note of the way that you pronounced the word spelled A P P A L A c H I A N. The safest way to say it is Appalachia. And I have to explain this to people because when I go off on book tours, I find myself being appointed as cultural ambassador, and I will get somewhere west of the Mississippi and people will say Appalachia. I will correct them and they will say, well, that's how we say around here. So I finally had to come up with a story to explain to them why it's not um optional. If you're in If you're in Ireland, in the north of Ireland, and you start out in Donegal, that city on the west coast, and you're headed for Belfast, it will take you most of a day to get all the way across Ireland, and you'll be driving on the coast road where if it's a clear day, you look off to your left you'll see Scotland in the distance. Well about halfway between Donegal and Belfast, there's a walled city which is hundreds of years old, was built by the Irish and they named it the Irish word for oak tree, which is dairy. But a few hundred years ago the British conquered Ireland and they changed the name of that town to London Dairy. So it is one town with two names. And so if you stop at a little store along the way and ask directions on how to get to the walled city, you can walk in and tell the man behind the counter that you want to go to dairy or you want to go to London Dairy, and either way he will tell you how to get there. But you need to know that when you choose what you're going to call that city, you have told that man whether or not he can trust you. You have told him your politics, your religion, which side you're on, and how open he can be with you. In one word, because dairy is what the Irish call it, and London Dairy means you sympathize with the British rule. Appalachia and Appalachia work exactly the same way. Appalachia is the pronunciation of condescension, the pronunciation of the imperialists, the pronunciation of people who do not want to be associated with the place, and Appalachia means that you are on the side that we trust. In Sharon's exam comple we see the transfer of information in an accent, and in many cases in history that personal info is carried with high stakes. Jeff Shreeve is a podcaster, biblical scholar, author, and longtime friend of mine. In the Book of Judges, in the Bible, accents were used to determine the region of the country that soldiers were from during a regional war, and life and death were in the balance. For context. The word we're gonna use shibbyth was the name of a river crossing, or maybe it's sibyl ef Jeff Shreeve, I am trying to understand how language is used. It has been used in the past two define people, groups and culture, specifically for my word that um dissecting here acorn. But I know in the Bible there is the story that very clearly shows that this has been going on for a long time, using pronunciation of words and accents to identify people. Tell me that story and Judges, Yeah, so there's I think it's Judges chapter twelve, and there's this It was really kind of like a warlord type of guy. His name is Jeptha and he was kind of an outcast in the land. He had his own band of Ruffians that he roamed the land with. The tribes were being oppressed by this this other nation, which is what we would call him today, the Ammonites, and so the tribe they reached out to Jeptha and his band of merry men, I guess, and asked for his assistance. He went out, conquered the Ammonites and everything was good. Well that a neighboring tribe, they were known as the Fremonts, they were upset with Jepthah. They were upset that this battle had taken place without them, and the Afremats just wanted to be a part. Well. They go to Jeptha and they said, hey, you should have called us, and he said, hey, I did. You never showed up. We had to go and take care of business. And so there's this battle that breaks out. They said, well, you need to leave the land, and He's like, I'm not leaving the land. I'm staying right here. I deserve to be here now. And so this battle breaks out between the Afremots and Jeptha's people. Jeptha and his people take the river river, They take control of the river that separates the Afremots land from the Gileadites land, and so the Afremots can't get back, and he starts really whipping the Fremots like they want to get back, they want to get back home, and so they start fleeing. And they would come to the places where you could cross the river, and Jephtha's people would go, are you an efremote, are you a Gileadite one of our people? Are one of their people? And they would say, oh, I'm Agiliadote, And assumably they look the same. Yeah, they all look at the same nation of people. They're all Hebrew people, so they would dress the same. They just have different ancestors within, except for they have a little bit of a dialectical difference in the way that they speak. And so they would come to the river and they realize, hey, some of these guys are escaping because they're just lying and saying that they're they're not freem Mites. And so they said, here's what we'll do. We're just gonna set up a test when we ask if they say, yeah, I'm a gillia Dite, let me cross the river. Say okay, say shiboleth. Now the area mites. They didn't say that. Evidently, they didn't say that shut sound right at the word sib They said sibilet instead of hivlet. And so when they would say it, it's kind of always imagine like Daffy Duck trying to say It's like they couldn't quite get it out right, and so they wouldn't say it like the frem Mites did, and that's how they would know, and they'd kill them right there. There was just this distinct exactly, and that's that's going on throughout history, like there's always these chivalts, is what it's been called ever since then in World War Two, So this has been used throughout history as a metaphor. It's used right now. It's used in towns, you know, it's used in warfare, it's used in culture, it's used everywhere. In World War Two, the Allies when they would capture German spies, frequently the Germans had been trained how to speak English, and they would know how to the about the culture and the customs of the Allies, about the American Allies. They would know about baseball, they would know I think there's even a Twilight Zone episode about one of these captures of the Nazi people are Nazi spies, but they were trained in British English instead of American English, and so there were little words that they would say that would give them away. And so frequently they would catch a Nazi spy. He would be speaking real clear English. He would talk about the Brooklyn Dodgers. He would he would say all of the right words, and they would say, Okay, let's hop in that vehicle over there, and they said, okay, I'm hopping in the lor well. The lory is what the British would call a truck. And so there's the giveaway right there, there's the ship leth and they know this is a Nazi spy. What does the pronunciation difference mean. It's not a hard word to say, a c O r in. I found myself deeply planted on the non traditional or at least phonetically speaking pronunciation of the word. I've learned that the southeast astern United States, roughly twenty of the country geographically pronounces the word the way I do. The other pronounces it phonetically. There is certainly something bigger at work here, and it might have broader implications. After some research, here's what I learned. Basically, the acorn pronunciation is a throwback to Old English. It's a combination of Low German, whose word for acorn is ecker spelled e c k e r, and the Dutch word. It's a combination of these and the Dutch word for acorn, which is acker spelled a k e r. By the fifteen hundreds, that English still had an urn on the end, and that arn still holds strong in much of the southern United States. This is the audio from a YouTube video titled a Quick Lesson on Southern Linguistics. It's on a channel simply called rob M. It's a very interesting clip about accents in the Southern United States. Most people don't realize that the American Southern accent is not a sign of ignorance, but actually the fact that, according to linguists, we're the only people left in the United States who generally still sounded like our ancestors, because if you listen to native born Southern speakers, the average Southern attends to sound more like this. What we call this moonlight Magnolias draw, because if you speed up that Southern draw over time, it rapidly becomes a British accent. Most people don't realize that people that came here from Europe were largely from the United Kingdom, so when they got here this was more along the lines of their speaking tones. But that's the first and the second generations coming off from boats, not their children, but that the unfull generations. The kids didn't quite something like mom and dad anymore, because they're starting to develop a society elongation of the way they talk what's today called the in your tide water accent. It's not a complete Southern drawl because that support area, but as you go farther into the southern interior and the year's progress, the accent tends to get thicker, deeper, richer by Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia peg. Yeah, you gotta full blow to Southern drawl. But people don't realize that in most cases in Louisiana, many of the native speakers don't sound like that. They didn't design like these are guarante spend a round the Bay youth, because you speed up that South Louisiana Cleo accent or time, it becomes Enfans French, with of course certain exceptions in New Orleans, which talent tend to sound like more like New Yorker's because of the Irish and the Sicilian Italian influence, so they didn't sound a bit more like this, and people didn't get a little confused because they think, what, you're from New York. No, I'm from New Orleans, White. So you have to realize that at the end of the day, Southern speakers, like I said, we're not ignorant, as it's often been assumed, but we simply sound like the ancestors that came here so many years ago. This is my mother, Judy. We call her Juju. She has a master's degree in teaching and retired last year after being involved in public schools for over forty years. She has a professional connection with the words spelled A C O r N. Maybe this gives some insight into why I'm so worked up about it all. Juju, where are you up here? I've got something here, I'm getting mud on your floor. I'm sorry. Okay, what is that an acre? It's an acren? Where do you work or where did you work? Your Acorn schools for thirty two years? Thirty two years? It's a consolidated school. Have you ever in your life heard anybody call it acorn school? On anybody associated with the school with a close knit association. Though no, no, No Acre Acren. We go to Acron Elementary. We are the Acron Tigers and it's the best school in Arkansas. People who are connected to the land can become obsessed with natural cycles. For me, a time of celebration is when the acorns start to fall. Typically, I'll commemorate the first white dook I find on the ground by putting it in my pocket. I just like to stare at it when nobody's around. Sometimes I keep them in my drawer here in my office. That might seem strange for many reasons because I don't eat acorns, but they're highly symbolic. My dad was like an obsessed drill sergeant when it came to finding them. Mean he still is. I spent the formative years of my life searching for acrons, and I still searched for them relentlessly. Here's my old dad, Gary Newcomb, the Black panther Man himself. We're sitting on the front porch in a rainstorm. So when I was a kid, we didn't hunt deer. We hunted acrons. We weren't looking for deer, we were looking for acrons first. And then dear sign, tell me what acrons mean to Gary Nucomb, Well, no one tell you can, Yeah, you can tell us a little backstory about you know, no one in my family deer hunted. I didn't know anything about deer hunting. And two really intelligent guys, principle of a school and the guy that just had like a hundred sixty I Q had a coffee shop and the deer hunt it. And I'd go to their coffee shop and they talked about deer hunting, and I got caught up in it, and they would take me hunting. They showed me and showed me how to shoot a recurve boat, but they couldn't kill deer. And I related it to play in chess. There's gotta be a way to get on these deer. And one day we were down in South Arkansas and a guy was at our camp and he said, deer's favorite food is white oak acorns, and if you have it was weird. Turkey hunt was real hard for me to learn. A lot of stuff is real hard for me to learn. But when I heard that, I thought, if I'm hunting humans, I'm gonna hunt at McDonald's. And I'm not gonna hunt at McDonald's unless it's got a lot of trash on the ground, a bunch of cars. I mean, there's gonna be some activity, you know. I don't want to go to McDonald's where there's not very many people. I'm going this has to be how to kill him. And keep in mind, I don't even hardly know what a deer track looks like. So as soon as he tells me, I come back to my hunting turf, and I said, I'm not leaving here until I find white oak acres dropping. And I had enough insight into it to where he didn't tell me this, but I thought, there's gotta be deer droppings there. I'm not gonna hunt unless there's deer droppings. And so I found two big white oak trees and I killed more deer, knowing nothing about deer hunting, and all of my buddies who were raised them with a boat. Yeah, and I mean it's like at a time when very few people were doing it consistently. Yeah, And I mean I missed a couple of pretty good bucks too. But the first morning I set up, I remember going home and telling my mother this, and I was a grown man. I didn't live at home, but I went to her house for breakfast or something, and I said, mother, you won't believe what happened. I found this white oakcacren tree with droppings under I put my ladder up the day ahead of time, and I sit in it this morning, and I had eleven deer coming in no more than groups of two. It was just like a movement. They were coming from my left to my right and it stopped. It was just it was like the most exciting thing you've ever found. Ticket Do you have any kind of like emotional high when you find a big, old, green, white of acron on the ground in October? I love it, man, I mean I love it. It's the first. It's just tells me the time is right, it's killing time. It seems honorable to me that if anybody's going to be particular about the pronunciation of any word, that same fella ought to have some deep knowledge of it, or he might as well be indifferent. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get a PhD in acrons. We're gonna nerd out on acron biology with one of the country's foremost wildlife habitat experts, Dr Craig Harper of the University of Tennessee. He's about as tall as an average to a high school point guard, and he's built like a bobcat. He's got a warm smile and overflows with hospitality. His ability to functionalize and communicate about the natural world is unusually adept, and by the looks of the turkey beards and big racked white tails that adorn the walls of his house, he is a veteran hunter. This is a deep dive into some of the most interesting stuff about acrens that I've ever learned. If you get lost in this nerd out, please stick around for the last section of the podcast with anthropologist Dr Daniel Roupe. It's fascinating, but I'll warn you this talk about acres with Dr Harper will likely change your life. To meet Dr Craig Harper, pretend like I don't know anything and walk me through the life cycle of an oak tree in the different species. Uh they flower in the spring. There are two different groups, of course, of oak species. You have the the red oak group and the white oak group. There's a couple of real distinguishing character sticks between those. The one of the easiest and most recognizes that the lobes of the leaves of red oaks have bristle tips, and those of the white oak group do not. They have pointed So a red oak has a pointed lobe, you know, a tree in the white oaks family, and not just a point not just a pointed lobe, but it actually has a bristle tip. Of more important points of those two groups is that, of course, of the species within the red oak group, their acrons require two years to develop, So they will flower in the spring and what will become the acorn begins to form and it grows through the summertime, but then it doesn't mature until the following summer and then drops the second fall. Red oak species thus then can have two acorn crops only at any one time. You know, the tree doesn't produce one year, oh and then two years later it might produce again. It can produce each year because it will have uh flowers and the acorn set and then mature two years. To an individual. In general terms, the species within the red oak group, those acrens have higher tanning contents, which is a phenomic compound that causes in a stringic or bitter taste they will not germinate until springtime. The acrons of red oak species are important into the following spring and even uh sometimes into the summer. So what you're saying is that red oak acren is gonna fall in the fall and late let's just say it falls in late October and lay there all winter long. It's gonna lay there all winter long, and it's not gonna sprout, and it's not gonna rot. Most of them will not rot, and wildlife will eat those acrens at that time through the fall and winter. But if white oak acorns and acrons of different species have different tanning content, those that are less astringent are available, you certainly may see various wildlife species select those, and thus those that were more astringent may lay longer. But the point is those acrons are available for a longer period than the white okay and and the white oak acrens. They fall in the fall. Most of the acron fall of the white oak species Quercus alba is in October, but nonetheless all of those of the white oak group, they will germinate in the fall and winter, and immediately very few, if any of them are available into the following spring, they fall, and it's not that long until they begin to germinate and and try to start, you know, sending down a little route. I want to tell you a story. Last week I killed a raccoon over my hounds. I cut his stomach open full of acrons. I mean they're still in red oaka acrens. Yeah, I mean he they're ill eating very good red oak acorns in March. And they are extremely digestible. Acrons, regardless whether they're eating in the fall, winter, or spring, are highly digestible and with a very high fat content, which actually increases the digestible energy that is available from acorns as opposed to many other foods. Another characteristic that distinguishes the red oak acorns from the white Oaka acrenes, or another factor is that the red oak acorns typically have much higher fat content than the white oak acres. So as hunters, at least me and my dad are always trying to figure out what the mass crop is gonna look like before it actually happens. So and I've been anecdotally studying this for twenty years, you know, just kind of keeping track of the last frost and when I saw oak tassel so I'll be driving down the road and yesterday I noticed oak tassels hanging off trees. Is there a way to make a even a reasonable guess about mass crop based upon all the weather variations of the spring. Essentially we're talking about pollination of flowers that ultimately turned into acrons. And if there's not successful pollination, or if that flower dies before it's pollinated, there's no acron. So there's got to be this successful thing that happens that's got to be impacted by rain, temperature, wind. It's very complicated, and to my knowledge, it is not highly predictable. There's another number of studies that have looked at all of the different environmental conditions that might influence acron production and successful flowering and acron setting. But I remember reading in in one paper and where it was somewhat predictable based on the number of frost in April, But there's no hard number. Oh, if we have three or you know, whatever the case, we need to come up with some kind of olklore anecdotor with some burglaries. And another influential factor might have been rainfall the previous summer. So there's lots of things going on that we we really don't understand fully because what we see is a pretty dramatic like you would if if you didn't know anything about natural systems or oaks, you just think that's an oak tree. It's gonna produce every year, which we know is not the case at all. And on a landscape level, there's these vast differences from year to year. You know, some years there's very few of a certain species or there's no acrons at all, and then other years it's a bumper cross and it'll vary along a certain slope gradient. You know, up higher there may be acrons, but once you get down low or vice versa. You know, you just don't know how the weather variables affected the oak trees on a given slope, on on a mountain. Yeah. I remember when I was doing Turkey research in the mountains in North Carolina. At the the top of the mountains, they were about fifty feet the oaks up there. Every year they would be flower in the first week of June, you know, obviously much much later than down down slow. So you're gonna have years where there's only gonna be acrens that made on the top of the mountains, years where there's only acrons that made lower on the mountains, and usually it's not quite that distinct. But you know, as hunters were looking for trends inside of natural systems. One thing we found in the research we did looking at UH mass production here in East Tennessee, and others have found this too, is that among white oaks, you're looking at about two good mass crops two years out of five. About two years out of five you expect good mass crops. And of most of the red oaks species, you're looking at a good mass crop one year out of three or or three or four years or so. It's a it's a little less frequent than with the the white oak group. I love it when we find places where still in we don't really have all the answers. I mean, it's such a complex system. And I'm talking about like, yeah, I love it when when when somebody like you says that Dr Harvard, because you get this sense inside of one with everything that we see and with the kind of the frequency that's admitted that just like the world is discovered, but it's really not. I mean, there's so much that we don't know, we don't understand, and I mean the natural systems are so complex it just blows your mind. And just the fact that we could pick something that seems so insignificant and acorn, and we could dive just a few steps past the surface and realize that there's things that we don't even know about them. You used the word that I believe is accurate when you're talking about nature and natural systems, and that's amazing. I find that that is a way overused word these days, that people just, oh, that's amazing. Well, I no, it's not that. Most of the time, it's not even hardly interesting, but it's certainly not amazing amazing, But when when you start talking about nature and natural systems and how all of nature fits together, that he is amazing. Yeah. Dr Harper did a research project where he and his students collected acorns under the same trees for ten years and tried various methods to increase acron production. To study was in depth and enlightened. Acorns is one of those foods that certainly can influence the nutritional status of individual animals, as well as influence the populations of some species on a year to year basis and even groups of years. You know, it trends over you know, like the course of three to five years or so. Something it we work to try and help people understand is that that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. And you know, for example, with regard to deer or with bears, immediately people think, oh gosh, you know, we we need we got to protect those, uh, those those oaks. You know, we don't want to be cutting down our acron trees. You know, that's that's what the deer, you know, they got to have. Well, it's interesting when you discover that, you know, for example, among the white oaks, only thirty percent of the trees produced seventy five of the acrons. If you do the math, and this is in my opinion, this is just math, you literally could cut down, in a in a solid oak stand half of the oak trees and increase the acron production by releasing the crowns of those individual trees that are the good producers. We looked at ways to potentially increase the acron production. One was by releasing the crowns of the oak trees by cutting down or killing the surrounding trees that were uh inhibiting additional sunlight to come into the crown of that oak tree. And and another was fertilization because you know you're reading you know, all the hunting magazines, of course you knows. And not only do you increase the acron production, you know it makes them sweeter too, do you know that? But anyway, we did. We did this for another which is not that's where you're going. It didn't, It didn't happen. But allowing additional sunlight to the crown did and in two ways, and it was really really interesting. Number One, once the crown is released, we found that on average that crown would increase in size by about twenty five in one year. That that's significant right there. But also after releasing those trees on a per square meter basis, those trees increase their acron production by sixty seven percent. While the other thing with regard to deer or bears, as I mentioned as well as many other species, is if you're killing those competitors, what you're also allowing to come into the stand of course as sunlight, and then you have the increase in the understory. But where I'm going with with this is that if you manage your woods in that way, you're not gonna see those differences in health of individuals or fluctuations and populations, because dear don't have to have acrons. It's nice when they're there, but the goal should be to manage your wood, your property such that they don't have to have acrens in order to have enough digestible energy during the fall winner to make it through in good health. And what you're saying is is that oaks aren't nearly as important for wildlife as we've once maybe maybe as much as we gave them cultural value. And I and and I think it's because we most deer hunters, well even most people that are hunting any kind of wildlife, whether you're a squirrel hunter or a bear hunter, you're interacting with that animal for the most part during one small sector that animals a year. So I mean, like, I'm trying to kill a white tail deer in October and November, and you're looking at what they're eating in mid October as opposed to what they're eating. First Gary Nucom said, go find white oak acrens and you'll kill a deer. But what you're saying, there's a lot of truth. They'll eat them. I've been under the assumption that acrons were the super food of the Eastern deciduous forest. I asked Dr Harper how important they actually are for wildlife. Dr Harper, I have for a long time said that the white oak acre and is the chicken nugget of the Eastern deciduous forest. Okay, my kids, if you if if they walked into a room and there was like a variety of food on the table and one of these was chicken nuggets, three out of four of the kids would go to the chicken nuggets before just about anything. So white oak acorns when they're on the ground are this highly selected food source for lots of games, from turkeys and deer, squirrels and everything. I've never heard anybody talk about the actual caloric content and nutrient value of it. Doesn't have to be white oaka acre necessarily, but just an acron in general in general, on average, the killer calories there's about three point five to three point six killer calories per gram, and and that that's very high. And and the total digestible nutrients in acorns is very high. That is higher than corn, that's higher than soybeans, that's higher than herbaceous forage, that's higher than the woody brows so it is a it is a nugget. I don't know if I called it a chicken nugging other chicken there, but yeah, yeah, exactly right. It's it's a highly prized it's highly palatable with regard to its taste, especially the white oaks. It's highly digestible. And and again the very important thing is the fat content, and that's what really helps increase the digestible energy in in in the acrons. Okay, three point six calories per gram. How can you just guess how many grams would be in a in an average sized white okaycrene as big as the end of your thumb if you did the uh the math about eight calories is that all? I believe it. It's just and that's a that's of a white oaka acern, So like media eight calories per acre, that's correct. An interesting thing is that the pounds produced is not that much. And I did a little calculation on this. I thought you might ask some of that. What we found in a good year is that there would be you know, around eighty acrons per square meter that that have fallen in a good year. Well, we wait all of these acrons and of white oak acorns, About two hundred acrens are required to reach a pound, and if you only count the acron meat, then it would be just over three hundred acrens required to realize a pound. When you look at the average crown size of white oaks, in a good year, a white oak tree on average produced about forty seven pounds of acrons or twenty nine pounds of acron meat. Would an acron be considered a nut? Well, technically it is an acron, but we colloquially call it a nut. Is a nut a biologically descriptive term of a fruit, Yes, but so acren is technically not a nut. That's correct, It's not an acorn. One of the things I'm most pleased with is your correct pronunciation of the acren fruit. Music to my ears, dr Mar, Music to my ear. You don't know how many places I go, especially when I'm up in Wisconsin and Michigan, and you know I love those folks up here. We poked fun at each other, of course, but you know every time I'm up here and we're talking about deer and have that management here acre? And what an acre? Y'all come on down here and we'll show you what an acre here, and we'll show you how to kill a deer too. I want to get down to brass tacks about the pronunciation of words, or at least bigger tax than we've already established. Why do people say things the way they do? We need an expert. Dr Daniel Rupe has a pH d in intercultural studies and teaches cultural anthropology to undergrad and graduate students. Just for a bit of street cred. The man speaks fluent Mandarin, Chinese and as overseas for twelve years, and he's a bow hunter. Dr Roupe. I love calling you, Dr Rupe because me and you are longtime buddies, and so I've never called you Dr Rupe in my life. Finally I'm getting the respect that I deserve. But you have I know for sure that you have some insight into this question that I do not have. And what I'm trying to understand is why are we so particular about the way that we say certain words. There's this thing that's pretty deep inside of me about certain pronunciation of words. No one told me to be particular about those, So what does what does that tell me about myself well or about our society? Sure? Sure, so I think it's a really normal part of the human experience. Everyone essentially, at like a primal level, is insecure. And so we're told, you know, as certainly as like Western Americans postmodern people, that you're an individual and you exist apart from everybody else. But really, in some ways your individual, but none of us exists apart from a social group. And the stronger and more solidly defined that social group is deep down, the more you can take a deep breath. And so we do all sorts of things, all sorts of behaviors, material culture, things we wear, think about like if you want to establish a really clear group boundary when you're in high school, you want to have the right brand tennis shoes or paints or whatever it was. And that's the whole reason why our culture has fats. Every you know, five or ten years, we recycle another fat. It's because everybody wants to fit in, not necessarily with like the popular crowd or whatever crowd it is, but as a certainly as adults, we want a clearly defined social identity, and identity doesn't is apart from a group. So acorn acorn. This kind of topic is one more tool that people use too so we use we use language in a really strong way to define what social group we're a part of. Constantly we invent language and culture continually changes, and we invent new words and languages all the time. And one of the main reasons we do so is we're trying to create, maintain, and establish a secure identity. Yeah, so, what does it tell you when somebody is really particular about something, they're highly insecure? Well, I wasn't gonna bring this up, but I do think you're very insecure. No, No, I think I think a lot of times. I remember. So, my wife, you know, is from Michigan, and so twenty years ago we got married, I went up there to visit her family. One of the first things her, my father in law, did was literally take me next door and introduced me to their neighbors and say, say something, Daniel, because he just wanted them to hear my acts. The way you spoke was a novelty too. Yeah. So, and I think, in of course, it can be very negative, but it can also just be very fun and very innocent and really a fun way of doing an establishing culture and language. But as we are establishing this cultural identity and establishing the groups that were part of there's got to be some advantage to that. I mean, like going back deep into human history. If me and you were the same and you knew I was the same as you, and by same, I mean we just had this background or some connection point, like there's a higher probability that you would help me survive. I mean, that's the whole point of social groups, is that? Is that about? Right? So if you think about like people, and you know thousands, thousands, thousands, thounds of years of people, they're pastoralists, they're semi nomadic, they're agrarian, they're farming, and you have a close knit, extended can ship groups of people who are doing the same practical activities every day, day in and out, all year long. But they are using literally the same lingo to make sure they survive. So we're all talking the same talk means safety and security provisions because you might say a corn and I don't understand what you're saying. And essentially, so this is where kind of the switch flips when you start talking about fundamental needs and somebody is different and uses different lingo. They look different, they act different, they smell different, you know, whatever it is the switch starts to flip and the question becomes, cannot trust this person at a deep level. So the the gentleman who really kind of is a seminal author on on this topic of of group held identity of Polish sociologists of the twentieth century, taj f Henry taj So. He was a Jew in Poland obviously at a time when he was in a group that was despised. So he really looked at this and wrote about it. And almost every author, anthropologist, sociologists who interacts with it is going to talk about him. And so he certainly sees it from a negative view, and a lot of times humans really use it in a very broken, destructive way. Um So, acorn acre not necessarily that loaded of a topic, but it's still the same in distrust totally. It's totally about trust. Do you recognize this inside of your life? Do you do? You see? Because I deeply identify with that now. I mean, if somebody says acorn like I don't acorn, I can't. I can hardly even say it. I don't inherently distrust, sir. But when I do hear someone say acorn, it's it's really strange. Like if I take a step back for myself and try to have this unbiased look, it's like I feel a connection to that person. Sure, Like yeah, when you say that it's an issue of trust, Like I kind of get that. Do you do you see any Do you recognize that in your life? I think maybe not. I'm not as insecure as you are, so I think maybe no. Definitely, definitely, I think everybody does. Because socially, every day we are operating on on what is called scripts, and so you kind of have a script of expected ways for conversations to go. And when you bump into somebody and they follow in general your social script expectations, you take a deep breath when they step out of bounds. But it causes you to a little bit of a pause. And no matter how small you you don't realize it, but cognitively you're constantly checking social scripts. Do people fit my expectations? Do they not? And almost all the time, difference is not seen as a neutral thing, or maybe even an interesting thing to be explored, but it's seen as a negative thing. The other thing that I'm trying to under stand is where is this healthy and where is it unhealthy? Because you know, like in this playful in this playful word that we're talking about here, acorn and a corn describe to me in like to concrete blocks, when is it positive and when is it negative? So we've already described when it's positive. So we're using creative aspects of culture. Things we wear, ways that we talk, behaviors that we have that we do um and and as a group with these certain people, I do these things together and we form a healthy social identity so I don't feel alone in the world. You know, that's that's healthy. That's good, it's normal, it's natural, and creatures were social creatures. Inherently, it becomes negative when in order for me to establish and maintain salient or solid social identity with others, I need to tear down or oppress the social identity of another. If I make identity by saying acorn, great, and I can say that all day long, and kind of the behaviors and other linguistic patterns that go along with that, fantastic. But if I need to like dually construct identity by saying acorn and then saying that people that say a corn are idiots, and you extrapolate that over behaviors nationalities, you know, whatever it is places you're from, any number. I mean, humans do this all the time. We make identity in a in a healthy way, but also in a broken way. So what is tribalism and how does it fit into language? So tribalism would be groups of people in a sense, they're bounded. There's a clear boundary around this certain social group. And so every individual exists in the center of concentric circles, and you keep going out. It's like me and there's my immediately immediate kind of nuclear family. There's maybe the people at my workplace, the people in my hometown, my nation. It just kind of keeps on out. A tribe or tribalism is somewhere I decided to draw a hard boundary. One of those concentric circles becomes my tribe, and we are out for us, and everyone else is out for themselves or or or potentially against us. And so tribalism becomes problematic because essential it is tribalism always negative. No, no, no, no, no, it's not. It is certainly not always negative, because it's in today's society it's often used as a negative term. It certainly has in the contemporary use of the word tribalism or the idea of tribalism essentially is weaponized identity. So some other group outside of me is going to try to force their identity on me, or they're gonna demean my our tribe's identity, or I'm going to do the same to them. That would be like the contemporary idea of the kind of the concept of tribalism would be like very native to human nature. That's how we exist. We all need a tribe. We can't exist by ourselves, which we just can't do it. So COVID nineteen happens, everybody's in lockdown, and like mental health plummets, suicide rates quadruple because we're isolated from our tribes. Yeah, so I guess I'm trying to understand where the boundaries are for being positive and negative, because, for instance, then like excuse me, Dr Roupe, thank thank you. You know, I enjoy living in the Southern United States, like it's my home, it's all I know. I like it. I feel like that's healthy. But at the same time, I see examples from anywhere anywhere where that becomes so much a part of someone's identity that it becomes almost weaponized and that's not cool. And I feel like I can be a Southerner, I could be a Northerner, I could be from wherever, and like have this love of the culture where you live, and that be healthy because you and I feel like it's dems in like respect for your own culture means to me that you respect someone else's culture, because like your wife from Michigan, like very different culture from Arkansas. She loves it up there. Family loves it, they've been there forever. They understand that they're really strange. They talk through their noses, you know, they know. I think so like you, there's a there's a place in a posture, in a way of living in which I'm certainly comfortable celebrating my own social identity, my tribe. But I don't need to denigrate another group in order to make that happen. If you, if you look at society and human history, really only in the last century, which is a whisper of time and the whole scope of humanity, have people been readily exposed to other groups, other tribes, so to speak constantly. I mean, we're just kid, we're more inner technology, technology, globalization. But I mean even you don't even have to go global aization technology. Think about the interstate system in the US. I mean things that really just in a fraction of a second human history have connected people unlike ever before. Whereas for centuries before that, of years thousands of years before that, sure you've had I'm thinking English in terms of the English language, You've got centuries of the English language and people existing in certain topographical regions and they would almost never encounter somebody else unless they were tradesmen or their at war, and that was really the only other time. And in those times there was expected differences. Of course, we're going to be different, but otherwise we are in our own little world, in our own little tribe, and every day we play with and create our language. Like you've got it. Let's say you've got a real good buddy and you hang out with this person a whole lot, or even like in your marriage, you and your wife, your your marriage starts to have its kind of own culture and your own way of talking, and your family has inside jokes. We do this all the time. Well, then you do that on a social level for centuries with the English language, and people are isolated from other groups, and it becomes even more becomes more defined, and then within like a few decades, you build interstates, trains, planes, the Internet, and all of a sudden, we're talking to people from all over all the time, and we're exposed to differences on a level that we've never been before. So we were the world is being mixed up way more than it's ever been sure, and what happens to insecure tribes is that makes them really uncomfortable, and so we tend to shut that down in one of two ways. We intrench ourselves or again we leave and kind of deny our own familial, identificational group. How how can we be balanced inside of this? That is one of the many human problems. Yeah, I think it takes a whole to self awareness, and I think it takes a whole lot of being comfortable with your own insecurities and just realizing that that mechanism is at work. So I guess what you're saying is you're just kind of throwing in the towel with saying acorn. You're just kind of okay with that. Well, I mean it's not spelled a C. There's an O in there. To me, this whole acorn, acorn kind of debate is proof that we're not rugged individualists. And that really is kind of an American myth that we love, and there's lots of great things about it. But we kind of like that we are self made man. You know, I'm kind of pulled myself up by my bootstraps, did it myself kind of a thing. But uh, the fact that we would argue about things like this or or use language different aspects of culture to find and make a social identity a home proves that we're not rugged individualists. Were really affected by we need community, we need people, we need relationships, and and we need them to be healthy. And the more unhealthy our social relationships are, the more upset we're gonna get about things like acorns and acorns. Even this idea of rugged individualism, which would have the idea that it's like the solo person that is a cultural group. I mean, like there's a whole bunch of rugged individualists. When we say we are individualists or we are self made men, I mean, you're always locating yourself in a group. So there's just as many self made men as there are the group that values that overtly and purposefully values connection and community. So it's kind of a It's kind of a semantics deal is because the rugged mountain man needed the mountain man rendezvous. He needed he needed more mountain men. And Dr Roupe, the first white tail buck you ever killed? What was he doing on that flat in the Ozark Mountains? He walked up? He's about what was he eating? One of these right here? Small acorn? The biggest mistake he ever made. I'm being serious when I say that the exploration of this topic was a genuine learning experience for me, and I gained new insight into myself. That's a good thing about being a hillbilly. I'm okay with not knowing, and perhaps that's the key to really knowing anything at all. I continue to be amazed at the things that drive us, that are unperceived and not understood. I think what I want to say is that culture is amazing. It's fun, and it adds context to our lives, and we really can't exist without the structure of culture around us in some way. But it shouldn't be the most important definer of our lives. I love being from the place that I am. I have an unusually strong sense of place. But if I say acorns or a corn that doesn't fully define me. Human life is bigger and more profound than the elementary definers of this planet. Perhaps there is another podcast being built as we speak, exploring the culture behind pronouncing the word as a corn. My goodness of the country says it that way. Here's my take home. An appreciation of our own culture allows us to appreciate and value other cultures. And I think that's significant. But I also believe there is great value in the preservation of individual culture. I would imagine, as long as there is spring and fall, and the oak's flower and acorns grow and come to ma surety and fall to the ground, and as long as we can hunt white tailed deer with bows and arrows and guns, me and mine will be searching for acorns. We're putting everything we've got into these Burglaries podcast episodes. If you've enjoyed them, I ask you to leave us a review and share this podcast with a friend. I really appreciate the sport