Vsauce Asks ‘Is Cereal Soup?’ and Discusses Several Linguistic Concepts and the Limitations of Language

In a recent episode of Vsauce, host Michael Stevens asks, “Is soup cereal?” The question begins a longer conversation about different linguistic concepts like reduplication and retronyms. Reduplication is when a word is repeated, either in part or in whole, for emphasis or the modify the word’s meaning, and retronyms are words that are modified to distinguish the original version of something from more recent versions.