"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 moreAllusionist 163. Rhino Borked Guy
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.
Read moreAllusionist 162. Self-Help
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.
Read moreAllusionist 161. Sentiment
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.
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