The Allusionist

By Helen Zaltzman

Society & Culture Arts

What's The Allusionist about?

Linguistic adventures with Helen Zaltzman, TheAllusionist.org.

A proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm.

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Allusionist 145. Parents

11.07.2021

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 ...

The Allusionist episodes:

11.07.2021 Allusionist 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 Allusionist 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?? ...
05.28.2021 136. Misogynoir “It's hard to address something if you can't actually name what it is,” says Moya Bailey, who coined a term that enables people to discuss a specific combination of racism and sexism: misogynoir. Find Moya Bailey's work at moyabailey.com. Her ...
05.14.2021 135. SOS SOS is a really versatile distress call. You can shout it; you can tap it out in Morse code; you can honk it on a horn; you can signal it with flashes of light; you can spell it out on ...
04.23.2021 Allusionist: Eclipse+ It’s August 2007. Lauren Marks is a 27-year-old actor and a PhD student, spending the month directing a play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She’s in a bar, standing onstage, performing a karaoke duet of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’…and ...
04.10.2021 134. Lacuna If you were in Brazil during the military dictatorship of 1964-1985, tried to bake a cake from a recipe in the newspaper, and were served with a sorry mess that tasted disgustingly salty, it wasn't your fault. What you thought ...
03.27.2021 133. Cake is Mighter than the Sword What to do to stick it to the powers that be? Send your message through something they really care about: cake. In Buenos Aires, local tour guides Madi Lang and Juan Palacios introduce me to priest's balls and little cannons, ...
03.12.2021 132. Additions and Losses "Sometimes I've heard people talk about losing a child and people say it's like losing a limb. And as someone who's lost both things, I just want to say, the realities are very different." Musician and writer Christa Couture has ...
02.25.2021 131. Podlingual In their podcasts Mija and Moonface, Lory Martinez and James Kim create autobiographical fiction in multiple languages. There are a few swears in this episode. Find out more about this episode at theallusionist.org/podlingual and hear the whole conversation, and the ...
02.14.2021 130. Valentine St Valentine's name may nowadays be all over the romance-related merch for 14 February, but he was also the patron saint of beekeepers, epilepsy and plagues. Let's get to know this multi-hyphenate saint a bit better. Find out more about ...
01.31.2021 129. Sorry Apologies are such important verbal transactions. So why are so many of them soooo bad? Susan McCarthy and Marjorie Ingall from SorryWatch and Laura Beaudin of fauxpolo.gy pinpoint what to look out for, to sort the apologies from the fauxpologies. ...
12.24.2020 128. Bonus 2020 Some choice cuts from the Allusionist vault of interesting things that guests said that there wasn’t room for in the original episodes
12.14.2020 127. A Festive Hit for 2020 The usual canon of Christmas songs may not really fit people's moods in this year 2020, when I'm not sure a lot of us are feeling all that holly jolly. So I drafted in singer and songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs ...
11.28.2020 126. Survival: Custodians of the Languages In Australia, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of languages. Until English arrived.
11.10.2020 125. Swearalong Quiz Fill your lungs and get ready to shout out some profane answers: it’s the Swearlusionist Swearalong Quiz!
10.25.2020 124. Nightmare This is the Alloooooooooosionist, in which we learn about the etymology of some scary words for Halloween, with the help of Paul Bae of The Black Tapes and The Big Loop podcasts, and Chelsey Weber-Smith of the podcast American Hysteria. ...
10.10.2020 123. Celebrity Celebrity used to mean a solemn occasion; X factor was algebraic; and fame was a huge terrifying Godzilla-like beast with many many tongues.
09.28.2020 122. Ghostwriter The word for ‘ghostwriter’ in French is a racist slur. How did THAT come about? And what can French-speakers say instead?
09.14.2020 121. No Title In 2014, a seemingly trivial and boring incident at the bank propelled me down a linguistic road via medieval werewolves, Ms Marvel and confusingly inscribed gravestones, to find out why the English language is riddled with all this gender. What’s ...
08.28.2020 Tranquillusionist: Home and Garden This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, quell anxiety and calm brain frenzies by replacing your interior monologue with words detached from significance. In this case: the list of HGTV original programming, and lawnmower adverts from before I ...
08.18.2020 The Away Team redux the language of migration
07.30.2020 120. Shine Theory It’s great when you coin a phrase that really resonates with people, right? Until they start using it for businesses and ventures that are at odds with the meaning of it… Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, hosts of the podcast ...
07.14.2020 119. Blood Is Not Water The Yiddish word for ‘black’ is, in certain uses, a slur. So Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, Arun Viswanath and Jonah Boyarin teamed up to translate Black Lives Matter without it.
07.03.2020 118. Survival: Bequest When the Europeans arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as guns, stoats and Christianity, they brought ideas of cisgender monogamous heterosexuality that were imposed upon the Māori people as if there had never been anything else. But one word ...
06.15.2020 117. Many Ways At Once The Scots language didn’t have much of a lexicon of LGBTQ+ terminology. So writer and performer Dr Harry Josephine Giles decided to create one.
06.03.2020 116. My Dad Excavated A Porno The word ‘pornography’ arrived in English in the 1840s so upper class male archaeologists could talk about the sexual art they found in Pompeii without anyone who wasn’t an upper class male archaeologist knowing about it.
05.16.2020 115. Keep Calm and Twenty years ago, a 1939 poster printed by the British government with the words ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ turned up in a second-hand bookshop in Northern England. And lo! A decor trend was born: teatowels, T-shirts, mugs, phone cases, ...
04.13.2020 Tranquillusionist: Punchlines This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, read the punchlines to classic jokes.
04.04.2020 Tranquillusionist: Best In Show This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, for the purposes of calming a frazzled brain, read the winners of Best In Show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
03.22.2020 Tranquillusionist: Nmiigea This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, for the purposes of quelling anxiety and stress and sleeplessness, read the lyrics to ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon, with the words arranged in reverse alphabetical order.
03.17.2020 Tranquillusionist: Your Soothing Words A relaxing list of the words you listeners find soothing
02.24.2020 114. Alarm Bells The vocabulary around climate is fraught. Here's how to navigate it, and how to communicate about climate in a way that does result in useful action.
01.24.2020 113. Zaltzology Ologies podcast host Alie Ward and I cover etymologies of words including ‘buxom’, ‘mediocre’, ‘coccyx’, ‘lacuna’, bust some etymological myths, discuss some broader attitudes towards language, and wonder why so many people hate the word ‘moist’.
12.24.2019 112. Quiz 2019 For your last Allusionist of 2019, here is a quiz all about words for you to play along with as you listen.
12.16.2019 Allusionist special: Podcast Podcast Here’s a special episode about the word that brought us all together… and a lot of you hate it.
12.16.2019 111. Engraving part 2: Precious Words engraved into metal are intended to last, though you don’t know who in the future is going to be reading them
11.26.2019 110. Engraving part 1: Epitaph When Dave Nadelberg of Mortified used to visit his mother’s grave, he would look around at the nearby gravestones and see similar - or even the exact same - epitaphs for lots of different people. And it made him curious: ...
11.14.2019 109. East West On 9 November 1989, the demolition of the Berlin Wall began. Within a year, Germany was unified. East Germany dissolved and was incorporated into the Federal Republic of Germany, took on its currency and its rules - and its lexicon. ...
10.30.2019 108. Enjoy! In the last Food Season episode of the current batch, we get into the language of restaurant service - specifically those terms that give some of us fiery indigestion, like “Enjoy!” or “Are you still working on that?” Restaurant psychologist ...
10.09.2019 107. Apples Late 2019 will see the biggest apple launch of our lifetimes. 22 years in the making, ripening on millions of trees into picture-perfect redness, here comes the WA38, more snazzily known as the Cosmic Crisp. The name was the result ...
09.15.2019 106. Typo Demom Ever misspelled a word or committed a typo? It wasn’t your fault; you were demonically possessed. Ian Chillag from Everything is Alive podcast introduces us to Titivillus, the typo demon.
09.03.2019 105. F'ood When is cheese not cheese, or crab not crab? When it’s spelled cheez or krab or even ch’eese or cra’b… Novelty spellings for foods-that-aren’t-made-out-of-the-thing-they-sound-like-they’re-made-out-of go back a pretty long way, and right now they're on the rise.

Older episodes

The Allusionist

What's The Allusionist about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Allusionist episodes:

Allusionist 145. Parents

Allusionist 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

136. Misogynoir

135. SOS

Allusionist: Eclipse+

134. Lacuna

133. Cake is Mighter than the Sword

132. Additions and Losses

131. Podlingual

130. Valentine

129. Sorry

128. Bonus 2020

127. A Festive Hit for 2020

126. Survival: Custodians of the Languages

125. Swearalong Quiz

124. Nightmare

123. Celebrity

122. Ghostwriter

121. No Title

Tranquillusionist: Home and Garden

The Away Team redux

120. Shine Theory

119. Blood Is Not Water

118. Survival: Bequest

117. Many Ways At Once

116. My Dad Excavated A Porno

115. Keep Calm and

Tranquillusionist: Punchlines

Tranquillusionist: Best In Show

Tranquillusionist: Nmiigea

Tranquillusionist: Your Soothing Words

114. Alarm Bells

113. Zaltzology

112. Quiz 2019

Allusionist special: Podcast Podcast

111. Engraving part 2: Precious

110. Engraving part 1: Epitaph

109. East West

108. Enjoy!

107. Apples

106. Typo Demom

105. F'ood

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