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This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, cheat on my own four-letter word season thanks to this suggestion from listener Erica: “Perhaps an idea for a bonus ep of a four-letter word season would be one on two-letter words: there’s an established list that Scrabble nerds end up memorizing, and it’s full of weirdness. For example: aa, oe, and mm are all acceptable words. But ew is not.”
Spoiler, ‘ew’ is now! It was added to the Scrabble dictionary in 2018. So, enjoy that.
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lot of dinosaur names as well are just being factual about size, like ‘mega’ - and actually a lot of the names are being factual about other things, like triceratops and pentaceratops: that's descriptive. Three horns; five horns.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Five horns. We're always telling you about the number of horns. And then a lot of them are just like, “We found this in this place.”
HZ: Yeah. The albertosaurus -
HANNAH McGREGOR: Albertosaurus!
HZ: - in Alberta. And, mastodon is meant nipple tooth, or nipple teeth.
HANNAH McGREGOR: …Sorry?
HZ: You look a little perturbed,
HANNAH McGREGOR: Perturbed and delighted. Vagina dentata is a sort of recurring theme -
HZ: It's a passion of yours.
HANNAH McGREGOR: It’s a passion of mine! Ha ha ha. Yeah, yeah, you know what? You're not wrong. It's a recurring theme in the book and my life. and so I'm really, I am intrigued by the idea of adding nipple teeth into the equation.
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MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Elsie does lie. I had just given her the "sleepy" button and I was in the kitchen. I was making lunch, and she goes to the button board and she says, "bedroom, sleepy, lie down." I'm like, "What a great contextual use. Yes, absolutely. Let's go take a little nap," and walk into the bedroom. And my cat doesn't come in, and I come back - and she's eating my cheese sandwich. And she has, multiple times, tried to send me out of the room in order to get my food. So when I'm making lunch and she starts talking to me and it's something like, “Go check the litter box” or something like that, food goes into the microwave and then I investigate whatever's happening.
HZ: How did that make you feel? You're like, “I can never trust her again?”
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: I don't know. I was like, oh, right. Cat.
HZ: It's a lot of deductive reasoning happening with how she's using language. Fascinating.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah, it really is - which is why, when I get comments on videos where it's like, “Oh, this cat is just walking across buttons randomly,” I'm like, no, I have a dog that does that. I daily have moments where I'm like, okay, no, this is really a thing that's happening.
This is the 199th episode of the show, and since before this show began, so for nearly a decade, I have been jotting down ideas in two documents - one for short ideas, one for long ideas. There are always more ideas than I have time and ability to make podcasts about, so now the documents are altogether 66 pages long and growing every day. So in this episode, you’re going to hear 199 ideas that I wanted to put into the podcast and haven’t yet.
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HZ: I thought the etymology of 'gas' was a big surprise as well.
SUSIE DENT: Oh, yes. It is a sibling of chaos.
HZ: In a sense, we're all siblings of chaos.
HZ: Which of the following sweeteners is named after an ancient Greek mythological character? A. saccharine, B. agave, C. stevia, D. aspartame?
ANDY ZALTZMAN: Well, Steve is not an ancient Greek mythological character. He's the third wheel In the Bible origin story along with Adam and Eve.
HZ: They got rid of him in the translations.
This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, say a load of words which aren’t really about anything so that your brain gets a little gentle diversion from thinking and/or feeling. This is not a regular episode of the Allusionist where you’re supposed to think and/or feel things. The Tranquillusionist is meant to be a bit dull, and maybe it’ll help you get to sleep or at least turn your existential screaming down to 11.
Today I shall be reading a list of gay animals.
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“There's a town in Quebec called Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, which apparently has the Guinness World Record for most exclamation marks in a town name. Which is two.”
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Around 700 years ago, the word ‘haunt’ first appeared in written English, at least 200 years before it took on the meaning of a ghost frequenting a place.
HZ: It just meant that way where someone haunts a bar, as in they go to it a lot, but they're not an actual ghost. But it also meant to have sex with. And I could not do enough Googling safely to find out why it had that sense, because it just came up with a lot of websites about people having sex with ghosts. So I cannot find the etymology of this middle English use of 'haunt' in the sexual sense.
PAUL BAE: You've just screwed up your Google ads logarithm by looking up succubus, haunting, "Why sex haunting?"
HZ: The things I do for this show.
PAUL BAE: Exactly.
TIGER WEBB: The broad thing about having unusual name is that it's a pretty effective substitute for an actual personality. I never had to develop one, because you could just do anything and people assume you’re interesting, or that there is some sort of grandiosity behind it.
HZ: Very colourful character.
TIGER WEBB: I'm really very boring and quiet. And the fact that I'm called Tiger I think does a lot to mask that. "Oh wow. Tiger, yeah, interesting fellow." I'm not though. But feel free to think that
