The Allusionist

By Helen Zaltzman

Society & Culture Arts

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Adventures in language with Helen Zaltzman. TheAllusionist.org

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182. Siblings of Chaos

09.24.2023

Lexicographer, author and Dictionary Corner resident Susie Dent has been studying words to make us feel happy. She brings etymologies concerning cows, gas, guts and fat, of bellies and breathing and bonanzas. And some that came from the high seas ...

The Allusionist episodes:

09.24.2023 182. Siblings of Chaos Lexicographer, author and Dictionary Corner resident Susie Dent has been studying words to make us feel happy. She brings etymologies concerning cows, gas, guts and fat, of bellies and breathing and bonanzas. And some that came from the high seas ...
09.13.2023 181. Cairns There's an abiding myth that the landmark dictionaries are the work of one man, in a dusty paper-filled garrett tirelessly working away singlehandedly. But really it took a village: behind every Big Daddy of Lexicography was usually a team of ...
08.25.2023 180. Project ENABLE Sterling Martin was in grad school, studying C. elegans worms, when COVID19 hit and suddenly he found himself in lexicography, as part of a team creating a Navajo-English dictionary of science terms. Browse the dictionary at EnableNavajo.org, and donate to ...
08.12.2023 179. Andy Quiz It's the annual etymology quizlusionist! I’m on a family holiday for the first time since 1988, so enlisted my brother Andy Zaltzman of the Bugle podcast to test his/your wits on singing goats, explosives, mythological Greek sweeteners, attics, left-handedness and ...
06.24.2023 178. Uranus Have you ever wondered why the planets in our solar system are all named after Roman deities, except two of them? One of those exceptions is Earth. The other is Uranus. Content note: there are mentions of Ancient Greek and ...
06.09.2023 Tranquillusionist: Gay Animals This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, say a load of words which aren’t really about anything, so that your brain gets a little gentle diversion from thinking and/or feeling. Today: a list of gay animals. Find a ...
05.25.2023 177. Fat part 2 “The starting point is, and the research questions are all framed by: 'We know it's terrible to be fat, but how terrible is it?' Not: 'What would it take to give effective healthcare to fat people?'” says Aubrey Gordon, writer ...
05.12.2023 176. Fat part 1 It should just be an accurate descriptor of my body, but the word 'fat' has shaped so much more of my life, and our society. "There is this whole set of baggage that we are all culturally bringing to this ...
04.21.2023 175. Eurovision part 2 Oh, you thought the Eurovision Song Contest was about songs? Or a fun international TV event that brings people together in lots of different countries? Or watching extremely vigorous dance numbers? OK, it is, but it's also about some pretty ...
04.07.2023 174. Eurovision part 1 There aren't many multilingual, multinational television shows that have been running for nearly seven decades. But what makes the Eurovision Song Contest so special to me is not the music, or the dancing, or the costumes that range from spangletastic ...
03.24.2023 173. Death "You can't redead the dead by you saying something shit," says Cariad Lloyd of Griefcast and author of You Are Not Alone; nevertheless when you're bereaved, people still are usually so nervous to say the wrong thing that they often ...
03.10.2023 172. A Brief History of Brazilian Portuguese "The myths, or the received wisdom, about Portuguese language in Brazil is that, of course we know we speak a very different version of the language, but this has always been explained to us as maybe perhaps a defect of ...
02.24.2023 171. Supplantation Last episode, I mentioned that in London, Ontario, in 2019 a 9-year-old named Lyla Wheeler had launched a petition to rename her street, currently called Plantation Road. This episode, Lyla, now aged nearly thirteen, and her mom Kristin Daley recount ...
02.10.2023 170. Actively Passive Over the past few years, numerous products and places with the word 'plantation' in their names have rebranded. As for the word 'plantation' itself, architect and writer Kennedy Whiters of unRedactTheFacts.com advocates for replacing it with a more truthful term. ...
01.27.2023 169. The Box Erwin Schrödinger is one of the "fathers of quantum mechanics". He also sexually abused children. Trinity College Dublin recently denamed a lecture theatre that had been named after him - but his name is still on an equation that won ...
01.13.2023 168. Debuts There’s been a recurring theme on the show over the years, of filling gaps in language, removing stigma and bias, finding better ways to express ourselves and talk about our feelings and our bodies. Today Kalle Rocklinger, sex educator with ...
12.17.2022 167. Bonus 2022 What do the hippocampus, homophones, Little Women, worrying and egg hacks have in common? They all star in the 2022 parade of Allusionist bonus bits! This year's guests provide some extra fascinating facts, thoughts and feelings: in order of reappearance, ...
12.05.2022 166. Fiona part 2 “I don't think that anyone should come away from this conversation not wanting to use the name Fiona. I think this is a beautiful and rich history. It might not be quite the history that you imagined, but I think ...
11.22.2022 165. Fiona part 1 A lot of people assume that Fiona is a very old Scottish name, but the first known Scottish Fiona is from the 1890s: Fiona Macleod, the enormously popular novelist of Scotland's Celtic Revival movement. But when she suddenly stopped writing ...
11.07.2022 164. Emergency When is a war not a war? When the British Empire called it an 'emergency' so they didn't have to abide by wartime rules or lose their insurance payouts. Artist and researcher Sim Chi Yin reflects on the Malayan Emergency, ...
10.21.2022 163. Rhino Borked Guy Provoked by current events, we've got three political eponyms for turmoiled times. Get ready for explosives, presidential pigs, Supreme Court scrapping, and wronged rhinos. Content note: there is some description of torture about halfway through the episode. Find out more ...
10.08.2022 162. Self-Help Self-help is a multibillion dollar genre of books, and Kristen Meinzer and Jolenta Greenberg of By the Book podcast have lived by the advice of more than eighty of them. They discuss the ways these books use language to get ...
09.24.2022 161. Sentiment Empathy and kindness can be noble concepts in themselves, but as terms are thrown around enough to have become buzzwords, and in the process lose some of their meaning and purpose. Audiomakers Sandhya Dirks and Julia Furlan, and academic and ...
09.09.2022 160. Coward “Anxiety is the parrot sidekick that rides on my shoulder and occasionally squawks warnings in my ear,” says Tim Clare, poet and podcaster and author of the book Coward: Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It. ...
08.20.2022 159. Bufflusionist Grab your stake and crucifix pendant, we're going vampire-hunting! Well, vampire-etymology-hunting. The podcast Buffering the Vampire Slayer, which recaps the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode by episode, invited me to answer their listeners' questions of language that the ...
08.05.2022 158. Creature Quiz There's lots of fun etymology of creatures and a lot of fun etymology derived from creatures, and now it is gathered into this fun playalong quiz about animal etymologies! There's an interactive answer sheet at theallusionist.org/creaturequiz, plus more information about ...
07.19.2022 Tranquillusionist: Australia's Big Things This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, say a load of deliberately boring words to distract your interior monologue from whatever dystopian stew it is in. Today: a list of the Big Things of Australia. The Allusionist is ...
06.25.2022 157. Queerbaiting The term 'queerbaiting' has evolved from meaning entrapment to marketing ploy to drawing "queer audiences into a piece of media that has no intention of actually meaningfully exploring queerness" says Leigh Pfeffer, host and producer of the podcast History Is ...
06.11.2022 156. Rainbow Washing From whitewash (the paint) we got whitewashing (the covering up of misdeeds) and from there greenwashing, redwashing, bluewashing, purplewashing, pinkwashing - and now rainbow washing, where companies will put Pride flags all over products and posts during the month of ...
05.27.2022 155. The Tiffany Problem The name Tiffany has been around for some 800 years. But you can't name a character in a historical novel 'Tiffany', because people don't believe the name is old. Science fiction and fantasy author Jo Walton coined the term "The ...
05.14.2022 154. Objectivity Couple of easy straightforward questions for us to chew on: 1. What is ‘objectivity’ supposed to mean? And 2. does it exist? Lewis Raven Wallace, a journalist and audiomaker fired from his public radio job over his blog post entitled ...
04.18.2022 153. In Character Chinese is one of the oldest still-spoken languages in the world. But when technologies arrived like telegraphy and computing, designed with the Roman alphabet in mind, if Chinese wanted to be able to participate then it had to choose between ...
04.03.2022 152. Asperger Hans Asperger would have been merely "a footnote in the history of autism", so why did he get to be the eponym in Asperger's syndrome? Because along with the usual problems medical eponyms pose, and his work not really earning ...
04.03.2022 152. Asperger - music-free version Hans Asperger would have been merely "a footnote in the history of autism", so why did he get to be the eponym in Asperger's syndrome? Because along with the usual problems medical eponyms pose, and his work not really earning ...
03.18.2022 151. The Bee's Knees Bad hats, cat's pyjamas, banting, goops, creatures, and playing possum - what WERE people going on about during the Golden Age of detective fiction? Caroline Crampton of Shedunnit podcast and I get sleuthing into the slang of the mystery novels ...
03.05.2022 150. The Egg's Warning "Warning: read and keep," says the piece of paper inside Kinder Surprise Eggs, in 34 languages; yet most people do neither thing. But sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris did read and keep it, and study what the egg is trying to tell ...
02.19.2022 149. Complex PTSD Complex PTSD is different to PTSD, but there's not that much understanding of it as its own condition - which was not much help to Stephanie Foo when she was diagnosed with it in 2018. We talk about facing trauma ...
12.23.2021 148. Bonus 2021 I've been saving them up all year, and now it's time for the annual selection box of Bonus Bits! Things this year's guests said that couldn't fit into their episode, or weren't related to language, but ARE related to being ...
12.07.2021 147. Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 2 "It's really good if we can get the changes through here - that can be an inspiration for other other countries or other places in the world," says Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir, chair of Samtökin ’78, the national queer organization of Iceland. ...
11.24.2021 146. Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 1 The Icelandic language has remained so stable over the centuries, speakers can read manuscripts from 900 years ago without too much trouble. And when they need a new word for more recent concepts, there are committees to coin one, so ...
11.07.2021 145. Parents When you're trans and pregnant, some of the vocabulary of pregnancy, birth and parenting might not fit you. In fact, some of it might not even work for people of ANY gender. Trans parents Freddy McConnell and CJ talk about ...
10.26.2021 144. Aro Ace The word 'asexual' has been used by humans describing themselves for several decades; 'aromantic' is newer. Both words enable people to voice identities that were unacknowledged for centuries, to find each other and build communities together, and to provide counternarratives ...
10.13.2021 143. Hedge Rider Today it's the etymologies you requested! And a few you didn't! We've got witches, wizards, warlocks; conjurers and cloves; wood shavings, nice gone nasty, and a whole lot more. Plus, a bold method of scaring away a ghost, if you ...
09.25.2021 142. Zero Did any number cause as much trouble as zero? It stranded ships; it scrambles the brains of mathematicians, calendar users and computers; it even got itself banned in Florence. Math(s) communicator and drag queen Kyne explains the Terminator of numbers. ...
09.10.2021 141. Food Quiz Quiz time! Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway of Home Cooking podcast join to deliver questions about food etymology, as well as what are the two words that make a dance track, and whether 'za' is an acceptable abbreviation for 'pizza'. ...
08.30.2021 140. Num8er5 We use verbal numbers and we use numerals - why do we need both? Why do we have the ones we have? What happened to Roman numerals? And what's loserish about the fiftieth Super Bowl? Stephen Chrisomalis, professor of anthropology ...
08.14.2021 Tranquillusionist: 282 Salads This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, read all the salads from the 1950 recipe book 282 Ways of Making a Salad, with Favourite Recipes by British and American Personalities and Stars by Bebe Daniels and Jill Algood, ...
07.12.2021 139 Ladybird Ladybug They're not ladies and they're not birds; they're not even technically bugs! But that's not the most surprising thing about ladybirds/ladybugs and their brilliant variety of names. Tamsin Majerus AKA Dr Ladybird explains why ladybirds are so great; and Johanna ...
06.27.2021 138. Mind My Mind Crazy, insane, nuts, mad, bonkers, psycho, schizo, OCD - casual vocabulary is strewn with mental health terms, but perhaps shouldn't be? Psychotherapist and podcaster Lily Sloane talks about what we're really saying when we use such words. Content note: in ...
06.10.2021 137. Dude Exclamation; sign of agreement OR disapproval; gendered, but circumstantially gender-neutral; term of endearment: 'dude' can do it all! But its connotations of a laid-back, cool, masculine person are only a few decades old; before that, it meant...an uptight city-dwelling tourist?? ...

Older episodes

The Allusionist

What's The Allusionist about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Allusionist episodes:

182. Siblings of Chaos

181. Cairns

180. Project ENABLE

179. Andy Quiz

178. Uranus

Tranquillusionist: Gay Animals

177. Fat part 2

176. Fat part 1

175. Eurovision part 2

174. Eurovision part 1

173. Death

172. A Brief History of Brazilian Portuguese

171. Supplantation

170. Actively Passive

169. The Box

168. Debuts

167. Bonus 2022

166. Fiona part 2

165. Fiona part 1

164. Emergency

163. Rhino Borked Guy

162. Self-Help

161. Sentiment

160. Coward

159. Bufflusionist

158. Creature Quiz

Tranquillusionist: Australia's Big Things

157. Queerbaiting

156. Rainbow Washing

155. The Tiffany Problem

154. Objectivity

153. In Character

152. Asperger

152. Asperger - music-free version

151. The Bee's Knees

150. The Egg's Warning

149. Complex PTSD

148. Bonus 2021

147. Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 2

146. Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 1

145. Parents

144. Aro Ace

143. Hedge Rider

142. Zero

141. Food Quiz

140. Num8er5

Tranquillusionist: 282 Salads

139 Ladybird Ladybug

138. Mind My Mind

137. Dude

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