Los Angeles Times

Commentary: What the yanny/laurel meme might teach us about our political and cultural divides

I heard "yanny."

This is, I know now, objectively wrong. In 2007, actor Jay Aubrey Jones was recorded pronouncing the word "laurel" for vocabulary.com. Earlier this month, a high school student in Georgia named Katie Hetzel played that audio clip, but like me, she heard "yanny." So she posted it to social media to find out how it sounded to others. By last week, yanny vs. laurel had spread across the internet, another low-stakes demonstration of how human perceptions vary.

"I'm intrigued," Jones

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