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.
Read moreAllusionist 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.
Read moreAllusionist 223. Bonus 2025
MP3 • APPLE PODCASTS • RSS • GOOGLE • POCKETCASTS • TRANSCRIPT
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.
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 173. Death
"You can't redead the dead by you saying something shit," says Cariad Lloyd of Griefcast and author of You Are Not Alone; nevertheless when you're bereaved, people still are usually so nervous to say the wrong thing that they often don't say anything at all. And especially not the word 'dead'. Maybe what we need, says council funeral officer Evie King, author of Ashes To Admin, is a "jazzy snazzy term for death, the 'bottomless brunch' of death..."
Read moreAllusionist 172. A Brief History of Brazilian Portuguese
"The myths, or the received wisdom, about Portuguese language in Brazil is that, of course we know we speak a very different version of the language, but this has always been explained to us as maybe perhaps a defect of sorts?" says linguist and translator Caetano Galindo, author of Latim em Pó, a history of Brazilian Portuguese. "You look deeper into things and you find you have to wrap your mind around a very different reality.”
Read moreAllusionist 171. Supplantation
Last episode, I mentioned that in London, Ontario, in 2019 a 9-year-old named Lyla Wheeler had launched a petition to rename her street, currently called Plantation Road. This episode, Lyla, now aged nearly thirteen, and her mom Kristin Daley recount the reasons why Lyla campaigned for this name change, how the neighbours reacted, what happened when the wider world heard about it, and why the street's name is still Plantation Road.
Read moreAllusionist 169. The Box
Erwin Schrödinger is one of the "fathers of quantum mechanics". He also sexually abused children. Trinity College Dublin recently denamed a lecture theatre that had been named after him - but his name is still on an equation that won the Nobel Prize for physics. And a cat.
Writer and historian Subhadra Das recounts how and why you rename a university building, and retired physicist Martin Austwick considers that renaming an eponymous equation or theory might be more difficult than unscrewing a sign from a wall.
Read moreAllusionist 168. Debuts
There’s been a recurring theme on the show over the years, of filling gaps in language, removing stigma and bias, finding better ways to express ourselves and talk about our feelings and our bodies. Today Kalle Rocklinger, sex educator with RFSU, the National Association for Sexuality Education in Sweden, talks about how and why over the years, the RFSU has come up with and publicised new terms for body parts and sexual acts, and what they would still like to change. This is the first part of the Telling Other Stories series, about renaming things.
Read moreAllusionist 167. Bonus 2022
What do the hippocampus, homophones, Little Women, worrying and egg hacks have in common? They all star in the 2022 parade of Allusionist bonus bits! This year's guests provide some extra fascinating facts, thoughts and feelings: in order of reappearance, Jing Tsu, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, Tim Clare, Stephanie Foo, Lewis Raven Wallace, Charlotte Lydia Riley, Hannah McGregor, Kristen Meinzer and Jolenta Greenberg.
Read moreAllusionist 166. Fiona part 2
“I don't think that anyone should come away from this conversation not wanting to use the name Fiona. I think this is a beautiful and rich history. It might not be quite the history that you imagined, but I think it's a beautiful history," says writer and performer Harry Josie Giles. She and PhD researcher Moll Heaton-Callaway investigate this complicated name with fascinating history, in this second of a pair of episodes about the name Fiona.
Read more