Allusionist 221. Scribe transcript

November 24, 2025 The Allusionist

TIM BROOKES: I've interviewed dozens of people whose experience of being taught to write was, at best, tedious and perplexing, and at worst brutal.

So literally about six weeks ago, maybe, I asked myself the question: when did I first enjoy the act of writing? And I don't mean enjoy writing as in enjoy writing a piece of journalism or enjoy writing a short story - I mean the actual physical act of writing. And in my case, the answer is July.

HZ: July 2025?

TIM BROOKES: Exactly.

HZ: Gosh. So you were already deep into writing this very book, several books into your writing career.

TIM BROOKES: That's right. And in fact, when I then went and asked people that question, many of them just stared at me because it had never occurred to them that it was something you enjoy.

Allusionist 205. Lexicat, part 2 transcript

December 7, 2024 The Allusionist

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.

Allusionist 204. Lexicat, part 1 transcript

November 24, 2024 The Allusionist

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.

Allusionist 203. Flyting transcript

November 9, 2024 The Allusionist

ISHBEL McFARLANE: “You crap so much that you sunk a ship you were on.”
HZ: I’m gonna use that.

Allusionist 192 Word Play part 2 transcript

April 9, 2024 The Allusionist

HZ: People assume to my face that a podcast about language won't be fun, and they're like, “Why would you do something that sounds so boring and dry and like a punishment?” What kind of reactions do you get when people learn that you make games about language?
KATHRYN HYMES: It's so interesting - for some people there's a similar reaction, but for a set of people, it's like you have given them the thing that they have most wanted in the world and maybe didn't realise or articulate or hope that such a thing could be made. And it's somewhat shocking that there's enough of those people and that the internet is able to connect it, you know, connect us to them that we end up finding each other.

Allusionist 135 SOS transcript

May 13, 2021 The Allusionist

PAUL TYREMAN: Three dots, three dashes, three dots. It's fairly easy to remember, it's easy to key, and it's difficult to confuse with other things.

CHRISTIAN OSTERSEHLTE: Maritime communication, especially in distress case, has to be distinctive, clear, and not subject to misunderstanding.

HZ: The main misunderstanding with SOS is that it stands for ‘Save Our Souls’ or ‘Save Our Ship’ or ‘Send Out Succour’. As if when your ship was sinking, your emergency message would be ‘send out succour’, cmon.

PAUL TYREMAN: It wasn't introduced because it meant anything.

Allusionist 114. Alarm Bells transcript

February 24, 2020 The Allusionist

ROBIN WEBSTER: I am as guilty as any, having worked as a sort of techie professional in this for a long time of writing those sentences that go "By 2050, the trajectory of the curve will be movement this and carbon capture and storage," these paragraphs that just mean nothing to nobody. And they are about things which are far away in time, far away in place. We were using these words like ‘sustainability’ and ‘trajectory’ and ‘parts per million’. And I was like, what on earth is this language? It doesn't say anything.
HZ: ‘Parts per million’: that's the stuff to get people up and ready for action.
ROBIN WEBSTER: 450 parts per million, let's go!

Allusionist 56+12. Joins & Pride - transcript

June 7, 2019 The Allusionist

To celebrate Pride Month, I’m playing two of the Allusionist episodes that have stuck with me the most during the show’s existence.

Allusionist 80. Warm Front - transcript

June 15, 2018 The Allusionist

NATE BYRNE: One of the things I find really strange when it comes to the weather is that we're all experts and all idiots at the same time.
HZ: You’re supposed to be the expert though.
NATE BYRNE: Right. Yeah! But I mean, we all live in it every day and we all feel like we understand the weather really well and we hear weather reports every single day. Now, if you are practicing a skill every day, on average you're generally excellent at it; that’s a real strength of yours. But it turns out that meteorologists typically haven't been very good at telling people what it is they're trying to tell them. So showers, just for example, means the rain's going to start and stop and start and stop; it doesn't tell you anything about the volume. Rain means it's just going to be continuous, and again doesn't tell you anything about the volume; but we have built, somehow, cultural expectations and understandings that go with those words that the scientists don't actually mean when they're using those words and it makes a really tricky job.

Allusionist 38: Small Talk - transcript

June 28, 2016 The Allusionist

ISY: Hi!
HZ: How are you?
ISY: I’m wearing trousers that are kind of digging into my bum in a weird way. They’re a cross between leggings and jeans -
HZ: - jeggings -
ISY: Yeah. And they’re partly falling down and partly digging in, which is quite a strange combination.

HZ: Well great, now I’m all too aware of the state of her bumcrack. But if I didn’t want to know how she is, why did I even ask?
Because that’s what we do, isn’t it? That is how conversations so often begin. And nearly every time, this is how it goes:

How are you?
Fine thanks, and you?
Oh, fine.

It's not informative, so why bother? It's an exchange that indicates a conversation is being initiated. It's small talk: safe, trivial - small.

Allusionist 13: Mixed Emojions - transcript

June 17, 2015 The Allusionist

Emoji - the 'e' means picture, 'moji', letter in Japanese - seem like a very modern phenomenon, dependent on the proliferation of mobile phones. But they have precedent in language far more ancient than our own. A picture per concept is pretty much what the ancient Sumerians were using to communicate some 5,500 years ago when they came up with the cuneiform writing system.