Listen to this episode at theallusionist.org/bonus2025

This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, present the annual parade of bonus bits from the year’s interviewees who said too many interesting things to be contained in their main episodes, and/or talked about non-language things – I squirrel all that away until, once a year, I let it all out 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.

I will link to all the people you hear today and the previous episode they were in at theallusionist.org/bonus2025. Also over on the show site there are transcripts for every episode, if you want to read your podcasts.

And yes, usually the bonus bits appear at the end of the Gregorian calendar year, but I had laryngitis! My voice was non-working for a month! Inconvenient in this profession.

Content note: the episode contains category A and B swears, and in the second half we do discuss anatomical and sexual swears. I will warn you before that appears though, so you know which part to duck out on, if that is not on your agenda today.

Listener Cliff messaged me to say, “You give the warning at the beginning of some show about category A or B swear words. Who made up the categories and where is a list of them? I’ve searched a couple of times, but all I get is lists of swear words and nothing about the categorization.” Well, Cliff: your questions are all answered back in Detonating The C-Bomb, the fourth ever episode of the show.

On with the 2025 Bonus Bits.

HZ: In the episode Bread and Roses, and Coffee, Alex Ketchum, author of the book Ingredients for Revolution, a History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses, talked about the 1970s and 1980s heyday of those establishments. Afterwards, some of you told me anecdotes about going to those places - keep ’em coming, I loved hearing about that. Here Alex talks about the problem with the terminology ‘wave’ as in first wave, second wave feminism, the fourth wave we’re presently in…

ALEX KETCHUM: There's a lot of scholars who have written on this, but one of the challenges with this wave theory – that many people may have heard of, that idea of like: first wave is focusing on suffrage, the right to vote, education movements and so forth, starting at the end of the 19th century, ending around the 1920s, kind of ending with suffrage; and then second wave of being like, does this turn 1963 with Betty Friedan's Feminist Mystique, or is it in the 60s counter-cultural movements? But 1960s, 1970s, kind of going until 1980s. And then this idea that third wave comes after the late 1980s and it's kind of like the daughters of the second wave. And then this question of: are we in a fourth wave now?

So while that can be sometimes a helpful shorthand, there's a few challenges with it. One is that it really is specific to the experiences of middle class white women in the United States and then other nations are trying to like hodgepodge onto it. The reason it's really focused on middle class white women's experiences is even within that kind of narrative, it's white women who are getting the right to vote in 1920s in the United States. So, for example, many Black women are not able to vote, until really the 1960s in the US. When we're looking in the Canadian context, Indigenous women aren't able to vote until the 1960s. So you have all of these different groups of women who are left out of that narrative.

And it also has this assumption that activism kind of comes out of nowhere and then just ends. And that's not really how activism works.

HZ: Yeah, often I'm just like, it's not the thing that changed, it's just you weren't paying attention in between these times.

ALEX KETCHUM: Exactly. And it erases a lot of the important kind of feminist work. It erases a lot of the work done by labour movements and farm workers movements and so forth. So it's kind of a narrow way of thinking about feminist history and the involvement in a lot of feminist actors.

And also, there ends up being like a flattening of history, where people assume that, oh, people didn't talk about racism in the second wave. Of course people talked about racism in the second wave. A lot of people got involved in feminist movement work because of their involvement in the civil rights movement. Many women of colour were talking about race in the second wave. You know, there's this assumption that every second wave feminist was a TERF, where there are many organizations like Olivia Records where one of the sound engineers was a trans woman and they actively defended her involvement in the organization. So, I think we sometimes lose complexity when we get those shorthands. But still it can be a useful shorthand. I think we see some trends and themes, but it also is really focusing on specific aspects of different generations. So, it's not terrible if you use it, but I think it's useful to have kind of like a sense of the limitations of the theory.

HZ: Since I talked with Alex, one of the establishments she mentioned, Bloodroot restaurant and feminist bookstore in Bridgeport, Connecticut, closed in December 2025 after running for 48 years – as far as Alex knows, it was the last remaining feminist restaurant of the ones founded in the 1970s. But there are ways to remember them, including the cookbooks they produced.

ALEX KETCHUM: Many of these restaurants produce different forms of material culture. So, they produce cookbooks, they produce concert posters, and so forth, which is really a rich part of this history and speaks to also their cultural contributions at large in creating these feminist networks that supported bookstores, credit unions – and which supported them in turn.

One of the things that I really enjoy looking through is the cookbooks themselves. I mentioned Bloodroot before and their first book, Political Palate. They've released many cookbooks over the years. And what is notable is that these cookbooks are organized by season, and actually the first one has micro seasons, so there's early winter, late winter – and underneath every recipe, there's quotes from lyrics of feminists who they admired, there's bits of poetry, there's artwork included that reflects what they saw as feminism and feminist food. And one of the really exciting things too was in their archival records, as well as a box of their own materials that they just let me borrow for a while, were all these letters of exchange of them writing to folks asking for permission to use this material, but also folks expressing how excited they were about having their own words within these cookbooks. So there's this kind of way that food is tied to this broader feminist culture and material production.

HZ: I have quite a big collection of 20th century cookbooks but most of them are from a bit earlier than that, so like in a very short space of time before that you've got these things that are hugely like reductive and this fairly awful portrayal of heterosexual drudgery.

ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, definitely. And I think, too, we can look at also: so, the way that cookbooks responded to feminist movements is a really interesting history. So there was the Working Women's Cookbook series, for women who worked outside the home, and saying like, here's quick meals you can make, without actually challenging or questioning why are we still expecting women in heterosexual relationships to do all the cooking? There was the I Hate to Cook Book cookbook by Peg Bracken. And there's also a lot of ones that are like quick easy meals that were kind of responding to the rise of more and more women working outside the household as well as inside the household – although many women of colour and working class women had already been doing that. But then there's also assumptions within lesbian communities that lesbians don't cook or don't cook well. And so there's cookbooks that respond to that and cookbooks that double down on that. So that's from the 1980s and 1990s and onward.

HZ: One such cookbook from 1983 was the Whoever Said Dykes Can't Cook? Cookbook. The title is really having it all, because it's insinuating that they can't cook but also can cook.

ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, it's playing on the stereotypes, bringing people in. Despite like stereotypes of like lesbians and lentils, many of the cookbooks have it, but then there's this kind of playfulness around it. There's this cookbook I have in my collection where it's like a toy dump truck with like chocolate chips and this idea of food by lesbians is trash, and then there's books that are really celebrating food and erotica and lesbian culture, and the sensations on the tongue and stuff. So there's all this really interesting interplay with this history of cookbooks responding to gender roles as well as sexual orientation.

So there's really interesting gendered assumptions and really different kinds of production of when mainstream cookbook publishers are releasing what they see as like a response to feminist organizing of like, here's quick meals, here's fast ones, here's like meal cheats, Versus actually a lot of the feminist cookbooks from the feminist restaurants are actually really detailed recipes that require a lot of steps and might seem actually to come up against or cause friction with some of the feminist movement principles. But here's where you see some of the divisions within feminist movement organizing, of like liberal feminism and corporate work culture kind of feminism and then kind of ecofeminism and some of the socialist feminist work.

HZ: Have you cooked any of the recipes from the cookbooks?

ALEX KETCHUM: Yes, I have. My favorite one is the Sourdough Chocolate Devastation Cake from the Bloodroot Cookbook. This recipe has been really significant for me in multiple times in my life. So when I finished my undergrad honors thesis, I brought copies to give Selma Miriam and Noel Furie of Bloodroot, and they gave me a slice of that cake to celebrate. But also when I did my PhD defense, I cooked the cake for the committee as part of my defense.

HZ: Cool!

ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, because I was like, we're going to talk about food, you need to taste this food.

HZ: That's so nice. I bet the examiners don't get that very often.

ALEX KETCHUM: No, they don't.

HZ: Onto something less palatable - poison! Martin Austwick, the Allusionist house band and husband and regular feature of the Allusionist live shows and livestreams that you can attend via theallusionist.org/donate, came onto the episode Bane Bain Bath where we talked about poisonous plants and he sang a delightful song about them. For our discussion, I looked up the etymology of the poisonous plant ‘henbane’.

HZ: I learned that henbane probably isn't from the word hen or bane as in killer, even though it could probably kill a hen. But that's just a convergent spelling and pronunciation from a different etymology. but that one's used as a soic or a painkiller since ancient Roman times.

MARTIN AUSTWICK: Well, so what did the hen and the bane mean in that?

HZ: It might be from an Indo-European stem, meaning ‘crazy plant’.

MARTIN AUSTWICK: It makes you crazy?

HZ: I think it made people hallucinate. It's kind of psychoactive, right?

MARTIN AUSTWICK: There must be a lot of stuff like that where – I don't know how things like ayahuasca made it into, like religious ceremonies when people ate it by accident and were just like, "I felt like I was outta my head for 24 hours and then I vomited everywhere."

HZ: Henbane was used in necromancy and and in witchcraft. Oh, okay. Which I think also gave it a bad rap amongst the squares.

MARTIN AUSTWICK: The squares who don't enjoy resuscitating the dead, you mean?

HZ: Yeah. But I think it's also if you drink a hallucinogen and then have some very psychedelic dreams, they can be like, who has psychedelic dreams, witches, and then execute people for witches. So it seems like it was less of a bane for hens and more for witches.

HZ: When author, editor and bookseller So Mayer appeared on the Disobedience episode, I heard from many of you saying, “What they had to say was what I really needed to hear.” One of the things we talked about was shame, and I wanted to ask So about one way I’ve noticed the apprehension of shame and disgrace shaping some people’s behaviour.

HZ: I was just thinking about some conversations I've had with people who are not being very good about using people's desired words, and people's pronouns and people's names, like chosen names. And I think with some of them, it comes from fear because they don't want to make a mistake, but in doing so, they deliberately trash a lot of stuff. And also I think just people are unwilling to accept that in a few years' time, it could all be different again.

SO MAYER: Yeah.

HZ: Like all the vocabulary could be different again. And I think it's all right to be like, "In five years time, what I'm saying now, because it's the accepted thing to say, will be wrong." It's moving fast.

SO MAYER: It's moving fast. And, you know, rigidity and authoritarianism go along with each other. The fear of getting something wrong and the fear of change are two of the things that allow authoritarian structures to persist, and shore up those structures. Fear shame, which is what you're describing, which is that shame has this social aspect, which is that there is a social cost to us to getting something as we perceive 'wrong' or being seen as different, and there is a threat attached to that. And sometimes that threat is genuine and there are genuine reasons for us to navigate or negotiate that as we need; and sometimes that threat is the chilling climate and it produces compliance in advance and often throwing other people under the bus to secure our own social status.

There's an understanding that certain people, or in certain categories or contexts, you make mistakes more often than not. So if you're new to a situation, whether that's because you're very young or you've just arrived at this knowledge, there's a leeway and a latitude that you are allowed to make mistakes. But that doesn't mean you can keep making them. Someone will say, "That was a mistake." But what's so difficult in our culture is sitting with that shame without dissolving under the threat of what shaming is so often used to attack us with.

HZ: Or the expectation, even if it doesn't necessarily arrive. I mean, I think often it is overstated as an outcome.

SO MAYER: It is. But once you've had that outcome, or once you've seen that outcome operationally, it gets internalized and people can activate that. They can use shame with this threat dangling behind it. So this idea that of being allowed to make a mistake, which is something that we all do when we're learning language actually, and a reason that many people have very fraught relationship to spoken language, to written language, is because they were shamed around using a word wrong as children. But you know what? Humans are very inventive and we can – it may take some hand gestures, it may take some asking questions and saying, "I don't understand" rather "than you are wrong." Imagine if we said that instead.

HZ: Mind blowing.

SO MAYER: Mind blowing. "I'm not quite sure what that means."

HZ: Or "that's new, to me."

SO MAYER: Or "that's new"; or, "you know what, I'll try."

HZ: "I'll try" is s a nice move.

SO MAYER: Yeah.

HZ: Hannah McGregor, of the podcasts Material Girls, Witch Please and Secret Feminist Agenda, came on the episode Dino to talk about dinosaurs, having written a great book called Clever Girl about the film Jurassic Park. Two of the characters in the film are chaotician Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler, played by Laura Dern, who in one famous scene rummages around in a heap of triceratops dung.

HZ: You compared yourself to Ian Malcolm as both academic and stylistically.

HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah. It's just true. Marcelle Kosman, my co-host on Material Girls, I think is a real Laura Dern, you know, very thoughtful, very concerned about the implications of work that's happening, very detailed oriented; and I'm just like, low cut shirts, gold necklaces, lots of swagger, very little research.

HZ: You don't put your arm up to the shoulder in a big pile of dinosaur poop.

HANNAH McGREGOR: I don't. I think that for me, that amongst other things feels like a metaphor for a certain relationship to research, which is like going deep and getting messy, like getting in the shit. And within the disciplines I work in, the closest version of that is doing deep archival research where you're like: I'm gonna sit in this archive for days, weeks, months, you know, going through microfiche, finding the, like, small details that will actually let me answer a question I'm trying to answer, right? Has this dinosaur been eating these berries? I gotta get elbow deep in a pile of shit to figure it out.

And I'm much more like: I like systems, I like the relationship between systems. I would love for somebody else to figure out the answer about the berries, but like at the end of the day, I'm sort of more interested in like, well, if the dinosaur had been eating the berries, wouldn't that be an interesting sort of indication of what happens when you collapse two ecosystems together that weren't meant to be together? What does that tell us about how ecosystems operate? Which is like what I'm doing in this book, which is a pretty Ian Malcolm kind of move.

HZ: So you don't need to put on elbow-length rubber gloves.

HANNAH McGREGOR: No. You read the reports that the people in the elbow-length rubber gloves write.

HZ: With some difficulty, because of the gloves.

HANNAH McGREGOR: You thank them and you value them, but you keep your own hands clean.

HZ: And you don't stand near them till they've had a good wash.

HANNAH McGREGOR: She gets some poop on her leg in that scene. And there's no opportunity between that and the end of the movie for her to have a shower, I don't think. So I'm pretty sure that means that she just has poop on her leg for the whole rest of the movie. So next time you're watching Jurassic Park, remember that.

HZ: It's gonna be very hot and humid where they are… a lot of running….

HANNAH McGREGOR: Maybe she sweats that poop off.

HZ: Maybe it gets rained off?

HANNAH McGREGOR: There's a lot of rain. I'm going to have to rewatch the movie with an eye on the poop.

HZ: The poop reading of Jurassic Park.

HZ: One of the things Hannah talked about in the Dino episode was how Tyrannosaurus Rexes - reges? - are depicted in the modern era as always having huge gaping mouths, even though paleontologists think that actually they did not go around with giant maws perpetually agape. So why the compulsion to portray them thus always?

HANNAH McGREGOR: Feminist film scholar Barbara Creed wrote a book called The Monstrous Feminine. And essentially her argument was that a lot of the iconography of horror cinema is rooted in sort of disgust with the abjectness of the feminized body. So these horrifying bodies are gaping holes, often fringed with teeth or tentacles; they're wet, they're leaky; they're trying to suck you into them and/or birthing things out of them. And it's, for her, rooted in this sort of terror and horror of the feminized body.

And so that in and of itself makes the sort of recurring imagery of the T-Rex, a kind of feminized imagery because of this gaping wide open mouth. There was a whole exhibit about T-Rex at the TELUS World of Science in Vancouver a few years ago, when I was working on the book, and the T-Rex like figure that they had: they'd put like strands of saliva connecting the teeth to like really make it look wet. And it was like, oh yeah, the open mouth is really important.

HZ: Well, now, no more imagery or euphemisms, because we have arrived at the Category A swear-related section of the episode. As part of 2025’s Four Letter Word season, linguists Nicole Holliday and Kelly Elizabeth Wright talked about developments in recent years with the cunt-word, used as a compliment in the terms ‘serving cunt’ and ‘cunty’. Within her role as the American Dialect Society’s Data Czar, Kelly Elizabeth Wright works on the society’s word of the year: the society takes public submissions for nominations and then 300 or so society members vote on them. For the 2023 word of the year, Kelly Elizabeth Wright had made a strong case for the nomination of ‘cunty’.

HZ: I would be so intrigued to know about the conversations you had to try to get 'cunty' to be the word of the year, how did go?

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: We have a live nominating session and a live vote every year. Before the live vote, a nominating session that we have, every year we do some crowdsourcing. That's like my job as data czar for the American Dialect Society.

HZ: Is there a special hat?

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Wouldn't it be so great? I think there should be.

HZ: At least a sceptre or something.

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: They've been trying to change my name to The Nominatrix and I don't like that nearly as much. I run the survey; I do the crowdsourcing; people can submit as many times as they like because language changes all year long, so you can give me multiple submissions or just keep a list and throw it in at the end. 'Cunty' was nominated, it was nominated by a bunch of people. And when we had our live nominating session, people walk up to the microphone and they make a case for a word, either words that are already have been nominated or they nominated a new word.

And so I spoke during the thing and said, “‘Cunty’: it's prominent, it's rapidly changing, we're watching that happen right now, so it feels very new, it feels of this year.” And then several older women in the room were like, “Absolutely not. Like, we can't do this. I don't understand what you mean about this word doing this and that.” And so I had to be like, well, okay, so like Beyoncé and like all this other stuff and like blah, blah, and it doesn't have the same meaning as an adjective, it takes on a different role – it's almost like respectful or something to do with admiration, and so I love that it's like so very different from the meaning of the word that it grew out of… And yeah, that didn't fly. It made it onto our list though;: it was a nominee, it just wasn't a winner. You have to make space for simultaneity too, though. Words are always going to be multiple things at any given point in time.

HZ: Ultimately, the American Dialect Society’s word of 2023 was won by ‘enshittification’ over ‘cunty’ – which, I do think enshittification was a very worthy winner. In 2024, ‘rawdog’ won, and the Society recently announced their word of the year for 2025 was ‘slop’.

One of Kelly Elizabeth Wright’s other jobs, as a university professor, is teaching a class on profanity.

HZ: What kinds of things do you observe in your students when they are learning to analyze this kind of language and think more complexly and deeply about it?

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: That's a good question. This is an intro level class, so these students come from all over the university; they're not linguistic students. A lot of what happens is, we get through like the first quarter and they try to be learning like the basics about how language works, which I think is really helpful. Students come in scared, for one thing, and – not scared about profanity, scared about linguistics.

HZ: Reasonable!

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Yeah.

HZ: Very complicated.

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Yeah. Well, it can be, for sure. When I run into people out in the world and they ask what I do, I get a handful of general responses, but one very common one is like, "I took one linguistic class, it was the hardest thing I've ever done!" Like oh, okay, alright.

When they start to get into their projects, they all branch off into these areas that they're most interested in, where someone is like, “I really wanna think about how these words sound,” or, “I really wanna think about how we build new words,” or, “I really wanna think about how people feel about them, or how they change over time.” So that's always something that's really interesting to observe; watching the students split off into these clusters of interests is always really fun, and they do a lexical history paper in which they look into like the origin, all the way from the beginning to now, for a particular word – but not just a word; they can do gesture, and also signs and stuff like that. So it's a lot of fun. I've had a student this semester doing the sign for ‘bullshit’ in American sign language.

HZ: What is it?

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: It's like the horns of a bull, and then the other arm, it poops out the back.

HZ: Nice.

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: So it's like two forearms on top of each other. The bull on one side and the shit on the other,

HZ: Incredible.

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: It is great. I know. I also have some students going in the other direction and doing minced oaths, like fricking, and dang – got somebody doing dang.

HZ: Wow.

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Which is cool.

HZ: That's fun.

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Yeah. I've not had students do that in previous semesters, so I love that. I love that we went in like the softer end, the masking of profanity side of it. Again: their interests are really varied and there's something for everybody and there's something for everyone in a linguistics class. You should take a linguistics class. There's something about the profanity class that drops a lot of walls really early. There's a lot more discussion.

HZ: Do you think some people sign up to it because they're like, "Ha ha swearing" and then they're like, "Oh my God, it's the most interesting area of language"?

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: Yes, I do.

HZ: Joke’s on them!

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: I've had students confess that before. So that's one thing. But then certainly the first time I taught it, a lot of people were just in there to be like, “hurr hurr,” but then it was crazy because after that first day – this happens every year – after the first day, I have students try to join. So it's like the handful of people who, the people who originally sign up for the class sign up, they come, they love it, they go home, they talk to their roommates and friends, and then everyone's like, “I wanna take the class!” And so that happens.

HZ: Nice!

KELLY ELIZABETH WRIGHT: It is nice. It is nice. yeah, it's fascinating. And definitely the best way to do an intro to linguistics class for sure – all of my examples are bad words.

HZ: And one last word from Nicole Holliday, who also talked about ‘cunt’ in the same episode.

HZ: Do you have a favourite swear?

NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Oh, you know, it’s an oldie but goodie, but ‘fuck’ gets you a lot of places.

HZ: It's so versatile; so many parts of speech.

NICOLE HOLLIDAY: Also. The fucking infixation? That is why, right? Infuckingcredible! Unfuckingbelievable!

HZ: It's a bit harder to infix cunt, I think; maybe it's just a slightly more difficult phoneme?

NICOLE HOLLIDAY: You have to do it with an -ing, maybe – uncuntingbelievable?

HZ: That that was quite nice.

NICOLE HOLLIDAY: I think it's got legs. We could do it.

HZ: Alright, cool.

Hey, if you would like to stay occasionally informed by email about Allusional happenings, since the social internet doesn’t help us out much these days, then you can sign up for a free account at Patreon.com/allusionist and it just behaves like a newsletter, no financial commitment required, and don’t worry, I am too lazy to besiege your inbox with abundant emails. But perhaps you’d like to hear about upcoming events, such as a livestream on Youtube on 24 January 2026 at 9pm UTC, as a slightly belated celebration of the show’s 11th birthday: I’ll be reading from my ever-expanding collection of vintage reference books and we’ll chat. It’s a really nice time. So join us via youtube.com/allusionistshow, subscribe to be able to comment, and go to Patreon.com/allusionist to sign up for free for occasional email newslusionist or in return for money, you get regular livestreams throughout the year, not just the annual birthday one, and you get written posts that are some of my most haywire output, including ones about the making of every episode - and best of all, you get the company of your fellow Allusionauts in the Allusioverse Discord community, where we are gathering each week to watch the latest season of Great Pottery Throwdown. Join us for that or other gentle socialising with your real imaginary friends at theallusionist.org/donate.

Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…

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.

Try using ‘glaucous’ in an email today.

You heard from, in order of appearance:

Alex Ketchum, author of Ingredients for Revolution, her new book is How to Organize Inclusive Events and Conferences, and speaking of those, the Queer Food Conference she runs is coming up May 1-3, 2026.

Martin Austwick is the house band of the Allusionist, and Martin the Sound Man in our other podcast Answer Me This; he also makes the experimental podcast Neutrino Watch, and music which you can find at PaleBirdMusic.com and Bandcamp but not Spotify because they’re evil, and if you’re still listening to this show on there, get yourself to PocketCasts or something instead.

So Mayer is a bookseller, author and editor - find their work at somayer.net including their recent book Bad Language which is a memoir and manifesto about language and power, and dragons, and The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin, which they co-edited.

Hannah McGregor is an academic and podcaster on such shows as Material Girls, and author of books including Clever Girl: Jurassic Park. On 2 February they’re doing a talk about Jurassic Park, for which you can get tickets to attend in person if you happen to be in the relevant part of the Netherlands, or attend virtually if you’re not.

Kelly Elizabeth Wright is a linguist and recently had a paper published in the journal Cognition. And the American Dialect Society just concluded their 2025 Word of the Year process so check out the results.

And linguist Nicole Holliday is @mixedlinguist on TikTok and BlueSky - she’s a great follow - and you can find more of her work on her website, nicoleholliday.com. That’s Holliday with a double L.

I’ll link to everyone at theallusionist.org/bonus2025.

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.

Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, whereby I will talk winningly and admiringly about your product or thing, get in touch with them at multitude.productions/ads.

Find me on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube @allusionistshow.

And you can listen to or read every episode, get more information about the episode topics and people talking about them, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, become a member of the Allusioverse, and browse a lexicon of every word featured in the show to find the episode it was in, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.