Even if you’ve never heard of Alan Smithee, there’s a chance you’ve seen one of his movies. Well, kind of. For decades, directors followed guidance from the Directors Guild of America by using the pseudonym when they didn’t want their actual name on a film. That most often occurred when the finished product was far removed from the director’s original vision due to studio interference or other issues. Most films carrying this dubious distinction aren’t well known — you probably haven’t heard of The Barking Dog, Let’s Get Harry, or Ghost Fever — but there are exceptions, including a Hellraiser sequel and one segment of a Twilight Zone episode.

The Coen Brothers have used a pseudonym on several movies.

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Joel and Ethan Coen have been writing, directing, producing, and editing movies together for decades, but they haven’t always used their real names. In order to avoid repetition, they’ve given editing credit to the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes, who has received multiple Oscar nominations.

Perhaps the most revered and well-known filmmaker to be credited as Alan Smithee is David Lynch, who disowned his ill-fated 1984 adaptation of Dune due to studio meddling; he has since insisted on having final cut on all his projects in order to avoid a repeat of that experience. (Lynch has called the film a “huge, gigantic sadness,” and though his name appears on the theatrical version, Alan Smithee is credited on subsequent editions.) Sometimes the reason for the pseudonym was less dramatic, as when movies such as Michael Mann’s Heat or Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman were edited for television or airlines and the director didn’t agree with the changes in those versions. Smithee officially retired in 2000 following a decision by the Directors Guild of America, though nonmembers have continued to use the name on occasion.

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Rules are meant to be broken, except when they’re not. To wit: There’s a rule for the order of adjectives in English that almost everybody follows without realizing it. It’s called order force, and it goes as follows: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. If that sounds hard to wrap your head around, think of a pet. You would refer to your beloved tabby who’s been getting on in years as “my old orange cat” rather than “my orange old cat,” which sounds strange and somehow wrong even if you’re not sure why. Order force is why, just as it’s the reason My Big Fat Greek Wedding wasn’t called My Greek Fat Big Wedding — the latter conveys the same information, but seeing it in that order just doesn’t feel right.

English came from England.

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The language was actually brought to Britain in the fifth century by three Germanic tribes (the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) from what’s now Germany and Denmark. It’s thought that Britons at the time spoke a Celtic language, whereas the invaders spoke a forerunner to Old English.

According to Mark Forsyth’s book The Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase, the stakes are higher than you might think: “If you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac,” he writes. Forsyth might be exaggerating for effect, but it’s still true that mixing up the order of adjectives in his example — “a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife” — into, say, “a rectangular old French little green lovely silver whittling knife” makes the description almost incoherent. Fortunate, then, that we all abide by order force whether we mean to or not.

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The number of global languages fluctuates each year — as of 2021, linguists recorded 7,151 actively spoken languages. But one dialect that has gone uncounted is the only language we can all decipher without a translator: baby talk. That’s because parental prattle using a softer tone and more rhythmic inflection — also called “parentese” — is believed to exist across nearly every spoken language. Recently, Music Lab researchers, now part of Yale’s Haskins Laboratories, set out to determine if caregivers of all backgrounds alter their speech when talking to babies. They recorded more than 1,600 parent-baby interactions across 18 languages and six continents, including urban, rural, and hunter-gatherer societies. The results showed that adults communicating with infants modified their voices and speech patterns in the same high-pitched, sing-songy way, transcending culture or language. What’s more, over 51,000 adults who listened to the recordings were able to correctly distinguish if the speakers were talking to babies or adults around 70% of the time — even when the listener spoke a different language.

Babies can read lips.

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Babies — entirely oblivious to manners — are notorious gawkers, and for good reason: Watching mouths helps them learn to speak. A 2012 study revealed infants between 6 and 12 months hyperfocus on speakers’ lips instead of eyes, which helps them decode and replicate words.

Parentese once had a reputation as silly, but some scientists believe that baby talk — at least the kind using real words, if delivered in an exaggerated tone — may have evolved as a tool to help babies and parents bond while teaching language skills. High-pitched sounds catch a baby’s attention, and stretched vowel sounds help them process and replicate new words. Using repetitive phrases, which can be annoying to anyone who’s outgrown diapers, is credited with helping babies memorize words and establish an early vocabulary. Recent research into baby talk’s benefits encourages parents to chit-chat with their infants from the start — young brains grow at a staggering speed, up to 55% of their final size in just the first three months after birth.

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