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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 123 Celebrity transcript

October 10, 2020 The Allusionist
A123 Celebrity logo.jpg

GREG JENNER: If we look back at classical sources, where do we get fame from? What does it mean? What's the origin point? The Greeks had a goddess called Pheme, and she is a winged, beautiful goddess, with a trumpet. She parps a trumpet. And that is your name being sung into the heavens through the trumpet. So it's a nice thing. It's good. You get fame and it means people going to hear about you. But when you get to the Romans, and we get one of the most famous Roman writers, Virgil, in his Aeneid, he talks about Fama, where we get our word 'fame' from. That derives from the verb 'fari', meaning to speak or gossip about someone. And Virgil's Fama is not a beautiful goddess with wings and a parping trumpet; she's basically Godzilla. She's a terrifying, massive monster who stalks the land and she's covered with eyes and ears and tongues, and she grows in scale the more people that are gossiping about you. So the more you're being chatted about or gossiped about, the larger this monster becomes until she's vanishing into the clouds and she never sleeps. And she hunts you down. And Virgil's version of fame is predatory. It's terrifying. It's this enormous force of nature that comes for you, and there's nothing you can do about it.

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In transcript Tags words, language, linguistics, education, comedy, entertainment, society & culture, arts, literature, etymology, lexicon, vocabulary, Greg Jenner, Hank Green, Who Weekly, Lindsey Weber, Bobby Finger, celebrity, celebrities, fame, famous, notoriety, notorious, renown, respect, bad fame, infamous, infamy, reputation, skimmington, history, Lord Byron, Marilyn Monroe, David Attenborough, David Schwimmer, Schwimfans, Richard Nixon, Brian Austin Green, Angelina Jolie, Ovid, Julius Caesar, Virgil, Chaucer, Godzilla, Aeneid, Metamorphoses, Fama, poetry, religion, attention, stardom, stars, stellified, charisma, kleos, akleos, glory, economics, media, tabloids, magazines, paparazzi, Whos, Thems, Herostratus Syndrome, Herostratus, psychology, Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Romans, Greeks, Romantic period, theatre, theater, movies, film, 18th century, 19th century, private lives, gossip, jobs, careers, goddesses, gods, deities, Greek deites, Pheme, infamia, law, legal, King Edward VI, Book of Common Prayer, sinners, Temple of Ephasus, meteorology, comets, celestial, Edmund Kean, Charises, Three Graces, X factor, X, oomph, oomphish, Ann Sheridan

Allusionist 101. Two or More - transcript

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

MARK WILKINSON: If you talk about something a certain way for enough time over a sustained period of time then it will likely affect the way people perceive that issue, right? So if something is framed in a certain way over a sustained period of time, you always hear the same words for something, then eventually it frames the way you think about it.

HZ: In this case, he’s been studying the use and framing of the word ‘bisexual’.

MARK WILKINSON: I think bisexual - the word bisexual, and the people as well - the word has had a really rough go of it. 

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In transcript 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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The Allusionist by Helen Zaltzman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.