Allusionist 61: In Your Hand
"It's sort of frozen body language; that's what handwriting analysis is about."
Since it caught on a couple of hundred years ago, graphology - analysing handwriting to deduce characteristics of the writer - has struggled to be taken seriously as a practice. But undoubtedly, there are things about ourselves that we can't help but reveal in our handwriting.
Read moreAllusionist 60: Zillions
They look like numbers. They sound like numbers. You kinda know they are numbers. But they're not actually numbers. Linguistic anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis explains what's going on with indefinite hyperbolic numerals like 'zillion', 'squillion' and 'kajillion'.
Read moreAllusionist 59: One To Another
Translation, A Love Story:
Translator listens to The Allusionist. Translator hears about the podcast The Memory Palace. Translator listens to The Memory Palace. Translator immediately becomes smitten with The Memory Palace. Translator translates The Memory Palace from English to Brazilian Portuguese, and turns it into a book - O Palácio da Memória - which will be published in Brazil two weeks hence.
But, like any love story, it's not quite that simple.
Read moreAllusionist 58: 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 then a blood vessel in her brain bursts. When she wakes up in hospital, days later, she has no internal monologue, and a vocabulary of only forty words.
Read moreAllusionist 57: AD/BC
There’s a small matter I trip over regularly in the Allusionist:
Dates.
Not the fruit.
BC and AD, Before Christ and Anno Domini ('the year of the Lord' ('the Lord' also being Christ)).
How did Jesus Christ get to be all up in our system of counting the years?
Read moreAllusionist 56: Joins
As considered in episode 51, Under the Covers part II, the vocabulary for sex and associated body parts is tricky to navigate in many ways - but even more so if you are trans or gender non-binary.
Following that show, I heard from several trans and non-binary listeners, recounting their experiences of that vocabulary; so I decided to make this episode about it.
Read moreAllusionist 55: Namaste
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Hrishikesh Hirway of Song Exploder wants people to stop saying 'namaste' after a yoga session.
Read moreAllusionist 54: The Authority
"Sometimes you want to make the dictionary sexy, but it's just not a sexy thing."
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