Allusionist 214. Four Letter Words: Bane Bain Bath

August 13, 2025 The Allusionist

For today’s instalment of Four Letter Word season, we’re hopping from ‘bane’ to ‘bain’ to ‘bath’, via poison gardens, doll’s eyes, alchemists, placentas and waterborne curses.

Souvenirs on BBC Radio 4

July 21, 2025 The Allusionist

A white chalk drawing on black paper of London's Hammersmith Bridge, under heavy clouds illuminated by the moon. The river Thames running beneath has letters strewn in it, some spelling out the word 'Souvenirs'

Huge news! House band Martin Austwick and I made a radio version of our live piece Souvenirs, and it’s being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 22 July at 16:00 UK time, and rerun at 00:15 BST Monday 28 July - here’s the link for listening live. It’ll also be available online via the BBC website and BBC Sounds, for a bit of time after.
UPDATE: it’s currently not available outside of the UK, so for now, people anywhere can hear it via Falling Tree’s archive. Ignore Soundcloud’s request to sign in, you can listen without doing so.

Souvenirs is a sort of essay/musical/tragicomedy about the Doves Press and its founders’ friendship collapsing and all manner of bitterness ensuing over their in-house typeface. Later in the year I’ll put something on the podfeed with more information about it. For now, I’d love for you to listen to Souvenirs, which I think is one of the most emotional pieces I’ve written. Some of those emotions are ones I recognise in myself and wish I could banish.

Look mum, I’m in the Radio Times! [Falls back down to Earth] With my name spelled wrong:

Allusionist 213. Four Letter Words: Dino

July 21, 2025 The Allusionist

The latest four letter word of Four Letter Word season is dino. 'Dinosaur' is derived from Greek 'terrible lizard', and they could have called it 'whopping great lizard' or 'sublime lizard' or 'hey cool lizard', but no. TERRIBLE.

Professor Hannah McGregor of Material Girls podcast and author of the book Clever Girl: Jurassic Park explains humans' relationship with language for dinosaurs, and why 'terrible' might be a perfect choice.

Allusionist 212. Four Letter Words: Park

July 4, 2025 The Allusionist

Get in, winner: we're going on a field trip.

Allusionist 211. Four Letter Words: -gate

June 23, 2025 The Allusionist

The other day was the 53rd anniversary of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, which not only caused a lot of political uproar, it had a big linguistic legacy: the suffix -gate to mean a scandal.

Today, as part of Four Letter Word season, we have a list of -gates - royal, sporting, political, food, showbiz - it's a non-exhaustive list because there are so many, and new ones are being spawned all the time. Content warning for all sorts of bad human behaviour.

Allusionist 210. Four Letter Words: 4x4x4 Quiz

June 7, 2025 The Allusionist

Four Letter Word season continues with a quiz (which is a four-letter word itself) about four letter words. Listen and play along to test your etymological knowledge, and hear about the original nepo baby, John Venn's invention that wasn't the venn diagram, brat, gunk, rube, the time(s) Led Zeppelin changed their name, and plenty more.

Click here to use the interactive score sheet.

Allusionist 209. Four Letter Words: Serving C-Bomb

May 25, 2025 The Allusionist

Ten years ago, on the fourth ever episode of the show, I investigated why the C-word is considered a worse swear than the others. Since then - well really just in the last three years or so - there has been a huge development: the word has hit the mainstream as a compliment, in the forms of serving it and -y. Linguists Nicole Holliday and Kelly Elizabeth Wright discuss these uses of the word originating in the ballroom culture of New York City in the 1990s, and what it means to turn such a strong swear into praise.

feed bullshit

May 15, 2025 The Allusionist

Hello! If you can’t access the show, that’s because something is going on behind the scenes with the feed. Should be fixed soon!

In case useful to you, the RSS address is: https://rss.art19.com/the-allusionist

Allusionist 208. Four Letter Words: Ffff

May 11, 2025 The Allusionist

Welcome to four letter word season!

We're kicking off with one of the most versatile words: it can be a noun, verb, punctuation, expostulation, full sentence on its own; it can be an intensifier, an insult and a compliment... and a Category A swear. Thus, of course, content note: this episode contains many category A swears, plus some sexual references.

several bits of news! (nothing bad)

April 29, 2025 The Allusionist

Hi, here I am on vacation in Norway, peeking out of a hole in the middle of a large sculpture made out of shiny multifaceted metal to reflect the trees and mountains around it.

Hello! It's me, your real imaginary friend, Helen Zaltzman.

Someone wrote to me recently saying, “I haven't seen a new episode, are you OK?” I'm OK, thank you! I took a break for some work things such as the return of my other podcast Answer Me This, and also to have a vacation. Hadn't had one of those for a bit. It was very nice. Strongly recommend vacation.

But the show will be back on the 9th May with a season about… four letter words! That's right: some of your favourite category A swears - and some not swears. If you have some favourite four letter words you want me to investigate, let me know.

There will be some behind the scenes podfeed shenanigans happening before then.So if you don't see more Allusionist appearing in your pod feed by 10th of May, then you're going to have to search for it in your podcast app and resubscribe because your subscription will have been kicked off by the behind the scenes shenanigans. And always the show is up to date at theallusionist.org.

Other news: live Allusionist shows are coming to Toronto on the 1st of June and Montréal on the 9th of June. We will be performing our very entertaining live show Souvenirs, which features some ancient swearing history that messes up our technology nearly a thousand years later, as well as the incredible story of a friendship torn asunder by a typeface. Plus, I'll be selling my hand-drawn tea towels, and anyone who comes along gets a free bookmark illustrated by me also.

Get your tickets now at theallusionist.org/events and I'll be back in your ears on May the 9th. Farewell! - HZ

Featured

Tranquillusionist: cheesy cheesybobs

This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, say a series of words to relax your mind, replace a hectic interior monologue, maybe lull you to sleep, hopefully quell the mental uproar just for a little while.

Today: nicknames for woodlice, and a list of cheeses from Great Britain and Ireland.

sorry lads, we're getting bad ads

TL;DR version:

For the show's financial survival (hopefully), over the next few weeks I'm having to switch on programmatic advertisements. This means, for the first time in the show's nearly 12-year existence, you may be subjected to ads that are not voiced, scripted and individually approved by me.
If you would prefer to listen to the show without ads in it, patreonise the show at the Gravy, Wedge or Check tiers, which include the perk of an ad-free RSS feed.

Click through to read the rest of the post about why I’m doing this thing I don’t want to do.

Allusionist 231. Lingthusionist

“Linguistics and language is such a good mechanism for being curious,” says Lauren Gawne, linguistics prof, author of the book Gesture, and cohost of the podcast Lingthusiasm. I'm in vacation mode (although not on actual vacation alas), so today's episode is a fun chat with our nice pal about making language podcasts, the firey digestive punishments for linguistics researchers, working in reality television, and cute tame nouns versus scary intimidating verbs.

Allusionist 230. Draculae part 4: Transformation

Throughout the Draculae miniseries, about the Swedish and Icelandic translations of Dracula that played fast and loose with the original text, I've been wondering a couple of questions: why are cover versions of songs and remakes of films so normal and acceptable, whereas cover versions in book form cause such a stir? And do these Scandinavian Draculae count as fan fiction? And if not, why not? Fansplaining.com's Elizabeth Minkel explains what fan fiction can mean.

Allusionist 229. Draculae part 3: Hunting Down the Count

Many mysteries accompany the revelations that Powers of Darkness, the Icelandic and Swedish versions of Dracula, are not direct translations of Bram Stoker's original, but stories that significantly differ in character names, plot and runtime. Like: did Bram Stoker write it himself, to publish some raunchy content that British censors would forbid? Was Powers of Darkness based on his early drafts? And did he really not copyright Dracula in the USA was that a deliberate ruse? Welllll... brace yourself for ole thrill-destroyer Zaltzman to pop your balloons of excitement.

queer playlist

Allusionist 228. Draculae part 2: Surprises in the Vaults

Happy World Dracula Day to all who celebrate!

This is the second episode of the Draculae miniseries, about a literary mystery which came to me via a meme: “Someone translated Dracula into Icelandic, and it took over 100 years for anyone to point out he just made a fanfic rewrite of what he wanted the story to be.”

In Draculae part 2, Ásgeir Jónsson explains how he got that Icelandic adaptation of Dracula back into print, to little fanfare - but then Dutch scholar Hans Corneel de Roos set about making an English translation. Following that: like me, Will Trimble also got meme-struck, and that propelled him to get a translation of the Swedish version that begat the Icelandic one.

Before listening to this, check out the first episode of the Draculae miniseries explaining the three versions of Dracula: Dracula published by Bram Stoker in 1897; the Icelandic version Makt Myrkranna by newspaper editor Valdimar Ásmundsson, serialised in his newspaper Fyallkonan in 1900-1901; and the Swedish version Mörkrets makter by an author known only as A—e, and serialised in a couple of Swedish newspapers 1899-1900.

Allusionist 227. Draculae part 1: Enter the Castle

A literary mystery came to me via a meme.

Allusionist 226. Suburbia

"The word ‘suburbia’ sort of evokes a very fixed idea of a place that is identikit, that all suburbs are the same, that within the suburb everything is the same, that all people are the same, all experiences are the same," says social historian and author John Grindrod. "I think it has this kind of flattening-out facility, that word, that isn't true."

Allusionist 225. Hues

You know what's an absolutely pesky kind of word to define in a dictionary? Colour names. A passel of lexicographers spent years - decades, even - trying different ways to describe colours in words for Webster's Third International Dictionary. It was such a huge, complicated effort that it took twelve years for former Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper to write a book about it.

Allusionist 224. Cosmic Hairball

Pack your oxygen tank, we're going up to space. There’s a lot of etymology up there.

Allusionist 223. Bonus 2025

Allusionist 222. A Christmas Carol

Today, we read the novelisation of The Muppet Christmas Carol, also known as the 1843 festive lit hit A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

Allusionist 221. Scribe

"I have never felt so naked. That's how exposed I felt at the idea that my handwriting was going to be seen by the world," says Tim Brookes, founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project and author of the new book about handwriting By Hand: Can the Art of Writing Be Saved? Writing the book (yes, by hand!) celebrates the act of handwriting, even overcoming the shame arising from his own.

Allusionist 220. Disobedience

“The more we look into social structures, the more many of us realize we don't fit into them," says So Mayer, author of the new book Bad Language, "So each phrase or set of vocabulary is another piece of that dismantlement.” We discuss finding vocabulary for oneself, coming out as a speech act, growing up under Section 28, busting through oppression and shame, and joyous listening.