What If You Had to Pay for Every Word You Said?

What if you got $100 every morning, but every word you say out loud costs ten cents? People say about 16,000 words a day, so you go quiet: nods, thumbs up, telegram-style Rudy. Then the catch: every word gets pricier each time someone in town says it. 'The' costs five dollars by noon, 'salutations' stays cheap, and three ordinary words cost forty dollars. An animated what-if about words, prices and saying it anyway. Chapters 0:00 Day 6: three words, forty dollars 0:10 The deal 0:40 Day 1: shut your mouth 1:12 Telegrams and texts 1:47 Quiet days 2:18 The catch: surge-priced words 3:13 Salutations, maternal unit 3:23 The two-minute talk 3:42 The wrong sandwich 4:09 The king's lines 4:28 Mom on the phone 4:48 Back to day 6 5:29 Friday: the play 5:45 The fine print Find the loophole: how would YOU beat this deal? The best loopholes go in Part 2. What's TRUE in this episode: ✅ People speak about 16,000 words a day on average (Mehl et al., Science, 2007). ✅ Telegrams were charged by the word; Western Union's last telegram went out in January 2006. ✅ A text message (SMS) holds at most 160 characters (GSM standard). ✅ The 10 most common words make up about a quarter of written English (Oxford English Corpus). ✅ Zipf's law: the most common word is used about twice as often as the second (Piantadosi, 2014). ✅ Ride surge pricing raises prices when requests outnumber drivers (Uber). ✅ American Sign Language is a complete language with its own grammar (NIDCD). Sources • 16,000 words a day: Mehl et al., Science 317:82, 2007; UT Austin news (https://news.utexas.edu/2007/07/05/do-wome...) • Telegrams by the word; last one 2006: Baltimore Sun, 4 Feb 2006 (https://www.baltimoresun.com/2006/02/04/te...) • SMS 160 characters: Telefónica, origin and history of SMS (https://www.telefonica.com/en/communicatio...) • Top 10 words: about 25%: Oxford English Corpus (summary) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_...) • Zipf's law: Piantadosi, Psychon. Bull. Rev. 21(5), 2014 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4...) • Surge pricing: Uber, How surge pricing works (https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/driver-ap...) • ASL is a full language: NIDCD fact sheet (https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/american-...) Music: Original procedural score (no third-party music). 🧾 With a Catch: every wish comes with a catch. Animated story; the town, the characters and the events are fictional. The facts stamped TRUE are real (sources above). Subscribe:    / @withacatch   #whatif #animation #words