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The Allusionist

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A PODCAST ABOUT LANGUAGE
BY HELEN ZALTZMAN

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The Allusionist

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Allusionist 219. Making Trouble

October 26, 2025 The Allusionist
a boggle grid spelling out the word 'trouble'

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.

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In episodes Tags arts, Molly Naylor, Making Trouble, creativity, compliments, praise, Twitter, ideas, Plato, Socrates, imagination, writing, despair, ageing, mortality, podcasting, validation, external validation, existential, meltdown, success, wrack

Allusionist 144. Aro Ace

October 26, 2021 The Allusionist

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 to what the allosexuals are pushing.

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In episodes Tags words, language, linguistics, education, comedy, entertainment, society & culture, arts, literature, etymology, lexicon, vocabulary, Helen Zaltzman, history, asexual, aromantic, ace, aro, AVEN, AUREA, Lewis Brown, LGBTQIAA, queer, sex, romance, relationships, sexuality, aspec, emotions, online, forums, communities, bisexual, aromanticism, gray sexual, demisexual, perioriented, varioriented, Plato, Ancient Greece, Greek, cake, dragons, obelus, LGBTQIA+, LGBTQIA, queerness

Allusionist 101. Two Or More

June 24, 2019 The Allusionist
A101 logo Two or More.jpg

Oysters, fragrances, canoeing, space stations, God, hats, and of course people - the word ‘bisexual’ has described a great deal of different things, with different meanings, in its fairly short existence. And that whole time, it has had a pretty bumpy ride.

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In episodes Tags words, language, linguistics, education, comedy, entertainment, society & culture, arts, literature, Helen Zaltzman, etymology, lexicon, vocabulary, bisexual, bisexual erasure, pansexual, fluid, sexuality, romance, love, sex, sexes, gender, gender binary, binary, LGBTQIA, bisexual+, plus, plurisexual, omnisexual, sexual orientation, identity, gender identity, nonbinary, NB, enby, genderqueer, unisex, androgynous, androgyny, hermaphroditic, Lord Byron, music, musical instruments, perfume, fragrances, hats, products, clothing, clothes, semantic shifts, fashion, intersex, Wolfenden Report, HIV, AIDS, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 19th century, Germany, heternormativity, uranian, urning, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Alfred Kinsey, Kinsey Scale, God, The Times, Times newspaper, newspapers, press, media, news, reviews, past tense, Plato, Symposium, Uranus, Aphrodite Urania, womanizer, relationships, semantic shift, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, queer, queer history
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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.