• Episodes
  • Listen
  • Transcripts
  • Tranquillusionist
  • Events
  • Lexicon
  • Donate
  • Contact
  • Merch
Menu

The Allusionist

Street Address
City, State, Zip
Phone Number
A PODCAST ABOUT LANGUAGE
BY HELEN ZALTZMAN

Your Custom Text Here

The Allusionist

  • Episodes
  • Listen
  • Transcripts
  • Tranquillusionist
  • Events
  • Lexicon
  • Donate
  • Contact
  • Merch

Allusionist 216. Four Letter Words: Terisk

September 8, 2025 The Allusionist
A Boggle set spelling out the word 'terisk' which isn't a real word

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.

Read more
In episodes, Four Letter Words Tags etymology, lexicon, society, culture, words, language, history, vocabulary, four letter words, England, Old English, Domesday Book, Doomsday Book, census, Skuma, land, Lincolnshire, towns, town names, place names, Martin Austwick, asterisks, subtitles, programming, errors, blocklist, swears, obscenity, AOL, Dominic Cummings, technology, internet, online, cunt, C word, swearing, block, Plymouth, Clitheroe, Penistone, Lightwater, Horniman Museum, Scunthorpe Problem, Clbuttic Problem, euphemisms, Legally Blonde, Elle Woods, Reese Witherspoon, payment, rent, eels, king, royals, prosthetic E, Normans, bottoms, donkeys, plays, mores, arse, ass, hachures, Scunthorpe

Allusionist 200: 200th episode celebratory quiz!

September 13, 2024 The Allusionist

I can scarce believe that I've made 200 episodes of this show, but here we are! To celebrate, here is a quiz about language where all the questions were set by YOU, the beautiful brainy listeners.

Read more
In episodes, quiz Tags words, language, history, etymology, vocabulary, ducks, moths, names, eponyms, traffic, driving, mathematics, writing systems, syntax, Korean, Hangul, G, creatures, sewing, sewing machines, bread, cloak, hood, St Martin of Tours, saints, holy relics, Portuguese, run, Douglas Adams, The Meaning of Liff, Canada, Canadian, double double, sign language, American Sign Language, Nicaraguan Sign Langage, French Sign Language, Jamaican Sign Language, British Sign Language, Lesle Hore-Belisha, road safety, loaves, yogh, letter G, lost letters, Normans, caput, French, dart, coffee, influence, influenza, town names, belisha beacon, calculus, chaplain, cobra, embarrass, ewer, flux, Ludlow, Milkshake Duck, monodon monoceros, mortgage, narwhal, rhinoceros, sewer, shampoo, toucan crossing, vilify, villain, vindaloo, acronyms, care package, Io, quiz, Greek deities, Zeus, Hera, cows, Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes, Greek gods, Herakles, Johan Christian Fabricius, suckmother, squid, Irish, dewclaw
Comment

Allusionist 53: The Away Team

March 31, 2017 The Allusionist

"Recognizing someone's humanity is crucial. Calling someone a migrant, calling someone an asylum seeker, calling them a refugee: these are official categories. But in many ways, depending on how they use them, they can change and become more negative."

So says propaganda and migration specialist Emma Briant, explaining the dangers of conflating and misusing the terms that apply to humans on the move. And British-Asian-but-kinda-not author Nikesh Shukla wonders where he's from - where he is really from.

Read more
In episodes Tags words, language, history, etymology, French, Norman Invasion, Normans, Old French, Norse, Vikings, invasion, foreign, foreign policy, English, Britain, Germanic, Romans, Latin, loanwords, immigration, immigrants, migration, migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, media, tabloids, newspapers, aliens, displacement, racism, foreigners
Comment

Allusionist 16: Word Play

August 12, 2015 The Allusionist
Wordplay Boggle board.png

Words are all over the place. So how do you turn them into fun games? Here to show the way is Leslie Scott, founder of Oxford Games and inventor of more than forty games - including word games such as Ex Libris, Anagram and Flummoxed, and the non-word game Jenga.

Read more
In episodes, Word Play Tags meat, game, games, hunting, Latin, French, Old French, 1066, Normans, Norman Invasion, history, fun, bluffing, Ex Libris, Flummoxed, play, cars, boredom, passing time, words, phrases, language, Oxford Games, Leslie Scott, imagineer, Scrabble, New York Times, scoring, letters, Viagra, products, product names, names, Swahili, Boggle, statistics, books, novels, etymology, Anagram, travel, journeys, alleviating boredom, naming, word play
5 Comments

Allusionist 9: The Space Between

April 22, 2015 The Allusionist
Space Between Boggle board.jpeg

I know this is a show about words, but forget the words for a moment; look at the spaces between the words. 

Without the spaces, the words would be nigh incomprehensible. And yet, they're a relatively recent linguistic innovation.

Read more
In episodes Tags language, words, Anglo-Saxon, Old English, Latin, Irish, Ireland, scribes, monks, medieval, Normans, spaces, punctuation, layout, nombril, disgruntled, gruntled, runes, runic, Ogham, Kate Wiles, history, writing, text, manuscripts, Old Irish, Romans, Christianity, email, URLs, hashtags, internet, Aristophanes, spelling, letters, phonemes, Chinese, oral tradition, spoken language, reading, pauses, lower case, upper case, majuscule, capital letters, carving, inscriptions, Anchorman, quills
10 Comments
Allusionist Patreon
Featured
Festivelusionists
Allusionist 221. Scribe
Allusionist 221. Scribe
Allusionist 220. Disobedience
Allusionist 220. Disobedience
Allusionist 219. Making Trouble
Allusionist 219. Making Trouble
Allusionist 218. Banned Books
Allusionist 218. Banned Books
Allusionist 217. Bread and Roses, and Coffee
Allusionist 217. Bread and Roses, and Coffee
Allusionist 216. Four Letter Words: Terisk
Allusionist 216. Four Letter Words: Terisk
Allusionist 215. Two-Letter Words
Allusionist 215. Two-Letter Words
Allusionist 214. Four Letter Words: Bane Bain Bath
Allusionist 214. Four Letter Words: Bane Bain Bath
Souvenirs on BBC Radio 4
Souvenirs on BBC Radio 4
Allusionist 213. Four Letter Words: Dino
Allusionist 213. Four Letter Words: Dino
Allusionist 212. Four Letter Words: Park
Allusionist 212. Four Letter Words: Park
Allusionist 211. Four Letter Words: -gate
Allusionist 211. Four Letter Words: -gate
Allusionist 210. Four Letter Words: 4x4x4 Quiz
Allusionist 210. Four Letter Words: 4x4x4 Quiz
queer playlist
Creative Commons Licence
The Allusionist by Helen Zaltzman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.