The medical term sialogogic, which means “producing saliva,” comes from Greek words meaning “to bring forth saliva.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Sialogogic”
A friend of mine sent me a link to a video, and part of the video included a simulated chat room from the early 1990s.
And my friend was saying, remember these, when the text would just go across the screen like that.
And I wrote her back, and I said, the one thing that it’s missing is the sialagogic sound of the modem.
Sialagogic, it comes from a Greek word that means saliva.
And the agogic is like a demagogue or something that drives people.
So you think it sounds like a slavering monster, the sound of the modem?
When I used to hear a modem in the early 1990s, I would just salivate.
Oh, I see.
So it’s cuing in you, this response.
I’m about to go online and wonderful things are about to happen.
Yes, remember that sound?
Yeah, I do.
I know you had that experience, right?
I absolutely did.
I mean, if I played that sound right now, wouldn’t you start drooling?
Probably, yeah.
Yes.
There was a particular time where I was running a tourist store in the Virgin Islands where I had no internet.
But in the shop that I ran, they had a PC that they used for some bookkeeping.
And when the manager wasn’t around, I was running the store, but they had another branch.
I would get on there and do this old-fashioned dial-up to a free net,
And it was the loudest sound, and I had to cover the speaker
So everyone else couldn’t hear that I was fetching my mail down.
It was weird.
This is the 90s, so early 90s.
Fetching your mail.
Fetching my mail.
You had to watch it come in.
That’s how slow it was.
Like a message every 15 seconds or something.
Ridiculous.
