Allusionist 223. Bonus 2025

January 16, 2026 The Allusionist

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It's the annual parade of bonus bits! Every year, the show's guests say too many interesting things and/or stuff that isn't languagey enough, so I save it up and release it in a delightful melange of facts and thoughts, about language and also not about language. That melange is today, and it includes dinosaur mouths and dinosaur poop, psychedelic plants, feminist cookbooks, and taking a class in profanity.

Content note: there are category A swears in this episode.

(And yes I know 2025 is over, but I had to delay this for a month while enjoying a nasty bout of laryngitis, AKA Podcaster's Plague.)

You hear, in order of appearance:

Alex Ketchum, academic and author of books including How to Organize Inclusive Events and Conferences, Queers At The Table: An Illustrated Guide to Queer Food (With Recipes) and Ingredients for Revolution, a History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses. She also organises the Queer Food Conference, next happening 1-3 May 2026. Alex previously appeared in the episode Bread and Roses, and Coffee.
Martin Austwick, musician and podcaster with Neutrino Watch, Song By Song and Answer Me This. Find his songs at PaleBirdMusic.com and Bandcamp but not Spotify. Martin has previously appeared in several Allusionists, but the one where we were talking about poisonous plants was Bane Bain Bath.
So Mayer, bookseller at Burley Fisher Books, editor of books including The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin, and author of books including Bad Language. They appeared on the Allusionist episode Disobedience.
Hannah McGregor, professor, podcaster and author of books including Clever Girl: Jurassic Park. They have been on the show a few times, but most recently and saliently in the episode Dino.
Kelly Elizabeth Wright, linguist — she recently had a paper published in the journal Cognition — and Data Czar with the American Dialect Society, which just concluded their 2025 Word of the Year process so check out the results. She appeared on the episode Serving C-Bomb.
Nicole Holliday, linguist and an excellent follow on BlueSky and TikTok @mixedlinguist. She also featured in Serving C-Bomb.

This weekend is the annual Birthdaylusionist livestream.

Join me and the aforementioned Martin Austwick for an hour of chat and relaxing readings from my ever-expanding collection of vintage reference books. Here’s the YouTube link. Kick-off is 24 January 1pm PT/4pm ET/9pm UTC&UK/check your timezone here.

For more regular livestreams, become a member of the Allusioverse at theallusionist.org/donate from $2/month — and you’re thereby helping fund this independent podcast (thank you!). Plus you get additional written content including behind-the-scenes info about every episode, and membership of the charming and nurturing Allusioverse Discord community, where we hang out and keep each other company, and we're also watching the current season of Great Pottery Throwdown together.

You can also sign up at patreon.com/allusionist for a free account to get occasional email updates about Allusionist stuff eg live events and the birthdaylusionist livestream.

YOUR RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
glaucous, adjective, technical or poetic/literary:
1. of a dull greyish-green or blue colour.
2 covered with a powdery bloom like that on grapes.
Origin 17th century: via Latin from Greek glaukos + -ous.

the dictionary entry for glaucous, adjective, technical or poetic/literary: 1. of a dull greyish-green or blue colour. 2 covered with a powdery bloom like that on grapes. Origin 17th century: via Latin from Greek glaukos + -ous.

CREDITS:

This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

The original Allusionist music is by Martin Austwick. Download his songs at palebirdmusic.com and listen to his podcasts Song By Song and Neutrino Watch. And together we are on the recently revived long-running podcast Answer Me This.
Find the Allusionist at youtube.com/allusionistshow, instagram.com/allusionistshow, facebook.com/allusionistshow, @allusionistshow.bsky.social… Essentially: if I’m there, I’m there as @allusionistshow.

Back in early February with a new episode - HZ.

Our ad partner is Multitude. If you want me to talk compellingly about your product, sponsor an episode: contact Multitude at multitude.productions/ads. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace, your one-stop shop for building and running your online forever home. Go to squarespace.com/allusionist for a free trial, and get 10 percent off your first purchase of a website or domain with the code allusionist.

Allusionist 222. A Christmas Carol

December 7, 2025 The Allusionist

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

November 24, 2025 The Allusionist

"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

November 9, 2025 The Allusionist

“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.

Allusionist 219. Making Trouble

October 26, 2025 The Allusionist

A change of scene for one episode: recently the brilliant poet and performer Molly Naylor interviewed me for her podcast Making Trouble, about creativity, and she kindly let me run a version of that episode here for you. We're talking about ideas, but also long-term creative careers, mortality, podcasting, external validation, and Molly offers some great prompts for either sparking ideas or making a dinner conversation a bit more lively.

Allusionist 218. Banned Books

October 8, 2025 The Allusionist

It's Banned Books Week. Honorary youth chair Iris Mogul and Sam Helmick, president of the American Library Association, talk about what it is, why it matters so much, and how you can get involved.

Allusionist 217. Bread and Roses, and Coffee

September 24, 2025 The Allusionist

In their heyday of the 1970s and 1980s, there were more than 200 - possibly more than 400 - feminist restaurants and coffee shops in the USA and Canada. These places were aiming to change ways of working, and upend the hierarchies of restaurants; to provide food that was ethically sourced and affordable to customers, while providing staff with a decent wage; to signal to particular kinds of people that a space was specifically for them. They didn't always succeed, and often they didn't last for more than a couple of years. But they sure did try things.

Dr Alex Ketchum from McGill University, author of the book Ingredients for Revolution, a History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses and cofounder of the Queer Food Conference, explains the ups and downs of how these places used words.

Allusionist 216. Four Letter Words: Terisk

September 8, 2025 The Allusionist

Watching the film Legally Blonde one day with the subtitles on, numerous perfectly innocuous words were partially asterisked out, because of a technological problem I can't name here lest this episode be blocked from search results, thus becoming an example of the problem itself.

Who's to blame? A 900-year-old man from Lincolnshire. Although he didn't ask for this either.

Allusionist 215. Two-Letter Words

August 26, 2025 The Allusionist

Listener Erica commented: "Perhaps an idea for a bonus ep of Four Letter Word season would be one on two-letter words: there’s an established list that Scrabble nerds end up memorizing, and it’s full of weirdness." In fact, there are TWO established lists, NASPA, the North American Scrabble Players Association, which has currently 107 two-letter words, and Collins Scrabble Words, formerly known as SOWPODS, used by the rest of the world and contains at present 127 two-letter words.

And this episode, we're going to hear all those two-letter words. If you don't agree with their Scrabbular validity, don't blame me! Some of the inclusions were a surprise, frankly!

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.

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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.