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 203. Flyting

November 9, 2024 The Allusionist

In 15th and 16th century Scotland, in the highest courts of the land, you'd find esteemed poets hurling insults at each other. This was flyting, a sort of medieval equivalent of battle rap, and it was so popular at the time that the King himself wrote instructions for how to do it well. Writer and Scots language campaigner Ishbel McFarlane and historical linguist Joanna Kopaczyk explain the art of flyting, where an insult becomes slander, what's going on within the speech act of performative diss-trading, and what the legal consequences could be of being accused of witchcraft.

Allusionist 163. Rhino Borked Guy

October 20, 2022 The Allusionist

Provoked by current events, we've got three political eponyms for turmoiled times. Get ready for explosives, presidential pigs, Supreme Court scrapping, and wronged rhinos.

Allusionist 162. Self-Help

October 7, 2022 The Allusionist

Self-help is a multibillion dollar genre of books, and Kristen Meinzer and Jolenta Greenberg of By the Book podcast have lived by the advice of more than eighty of them. They discuss the ways these books use language to get into your brain, the negging and the euphemisms, what can actually be helpful, and why we should be more like dog.

Allusionist 161. Sentiment

September 23, 2022 The Allusionist

Empathy and kindness can be noble concepts in themselves, but as terms are thrown around enough to have become buzzwords, and in the process lose some of their meaning and purpose. Audiomakers Sandhya Dirks and Julia Furlan, and academic and podcaster Hannah McGregor, discuss the value and pitfalls of appealing to the emotions.

Allusionist 160. Coward

September 9, 2022 The Allusionist

“Anxiety is the parrot sidekick that rides on my shoulder and occasionally squawks warnings in my ear,” says Tim Clare, poet and podcaster and author of the book Coward: Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It. We talk about anxiety, cowardice, magic bullets vs silver bullets, the scary Bible, and seagulls.

Allusionist 159. Bufflusionist

August 19, 2022 The Allusionist

Grab your stake and crucifix pendant, we're going vampire-hunting! Well, vampire-etymology-hunting. The podcast Buffering the Vampire Slayer, which recaps the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode by episode, invited me to answer their listeners' questions of language that the show had provoked. Together with BVTS hosts Kristin Russo and Jenny Owen Youngs, I tackle the etymology of coven, vampire/vampyre, wigging out, the name Buffy and Bovril; as well as google as a verb, conlang on TV, and why Latin is so often the language of spells and spookiness.

Allusionist 158. Creature Quiz!

August 5, 2022 The Allusionist

There's lots of fun etymology of creatures and a lot of fun etymology derived from creatures, and now it is gathered into this fun playalong quiz about animal etymologies!

Allusionist 157. Queerbaiting

June 25, 2022 The Allusionist

The term 'queerbaiting' has evolved from meaning entrapment to marketing ploy to drawing "queer audiences into a piece of media that has no intention of actually meaningfully exploring queerness" says Leigh Pfeffer, host and producer of the podcast History Is Gay. Leigh tracks where the word's various incarnations came from, and why it should not be confused with 'queer coding'

Allusionist 156. Rainbow Washing

June 10, 2022 The Allusionist

From whitewash (the paint) we got whitewashing (the covering up of misdeeds) and from there greenwashing, redwashing, bluewashing, purplewashing, pinkwashing - and now rainbow washing, where companies will put Pride flags all over products and posts during the month of June, but behind the scenes will not necessarily be useful - and sometimes they'll be anti-useful.

Mitra Kaboli, host of the new podcast Welcome to Provincetown, helps sort the real allyship from the rainbow-washing; and writer Sarah Schulman, who popularised the term 'pinkwashing', explains the more political meaning of the word.

Featured

Allusionist 233. Phobia

'Phobia' gets used for anything from a mild aversion to a debilitating anxiety response to various forms of bigotry. Deboki Chakravarti and Sam Jones of the podcast Tiny Matters join to consider the term from its comedic origins with one of the founding fathers of the USA, via rabies and Greek deities, to its role in their lives today.

CONTENT NOTE: we’re not trying to stoke anyone’s phobias, but we do discuss some common phobia-inducers, including snakes, germs and small holes, and there’s a brief mention of tarantulas. There’s also talk about OCD and rabies.

Allusionist 232. Vega

What do you call yourself if you're a part-time vegetarian? What petty linguistic things would you change? And what do you do if people gripe at you if you say that you are bi or pan? To answer these questions from the Allusionist mailbag are esteemed alumsionists: Hrishikesh Hirway and Samin Nosrat of Home Cooking podcast; academic and author Alex Ketchum; lexicographer Kory Stamper; and linguist Lauren Gawne of Lingthusiasm podcast.

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 AKA rolypoly bugs AKA slaters AKA all these other things; and a list of cheeses from Great Britain and Ireland.

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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.