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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 137 Dude transcript

June 10, 2021 The Allusionist
A137 Dude logo.jpeg

Till about the 1950s, ‘dude’ still had this connotation of someone out of place, a tourist trying to dress like a local and failing. And in that sense, it was gender neutral for a bit. Then, somehow, it became cool.

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In transcript Tags words, language, linguistics, education, comedy, entertainment, society & culture, arts, literature, etymology, lexicon, vocabulary, Helen Zaltzman, Callie Wright, Queersplaining, dude, Yankee Doodle, macaronis, history, slang, terms of endearment, insults, USA, David Bowie, songs, lyrics, movies, films, Easy Rider, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, gender neutral, non binary, gender, guys, Pacheco, zoot suit, Mexican Americans, African Americans, AAVE, surfing, saros

Allusionist 127 A Festive Hit for 2020 transcript

December 14, 2020 The Allusionist
A127 Festive Hit for 2020 logo.jpeg

Nothing says "Happy Holidays, fam" like "Stay the fuck away from me".

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In transcript Tags words, language, linguistics, education, comedy, entertainment, society & culture, arts, literature, etymology, lexicon, vocabulary, Jenny Owen Youngs, music, songs, songwriting, writing, writers, lyrics, corpus linguistics, holly, jolly, Christmas, Xmas, Christ’s thorn, festive, holidays, yule, Winterval, meat, sweats, mistletoe, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, Holly Jolly Christmas, Zoom, yarak

Allusionist 118 Survival: Bequest transcript

July 4, 2020 The Allusionist
A118 logo Survival Bequest.jpg

ELIZABETH KEREKERE: I'm so convinced that transphobia, biphobia, homophobia are such an integral part of colonisation, I reject that as a colonial construct, I reject it as racist.
As they took our land - tried to take all of our land, tried to take all of our language and suppress our culture, they also took our expressions of sexuality and gender. And that is important to us in a core part of our culture, especially because the way that the institutional racism, the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of colonisation has impacted on us and the levels of discrimination against people with diverse genders, sexualities and sex characteristics, that we see that all of this, all of this was a massive attempt to cover up what was already there and pretend it never happened.

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In transcript Tags words, language, linguistics, education, comedy, entertainment, society & culture, arts, literature, Helen Zaltzman, etymology, lexicon, vocabulary, Hemi Kelly, Elizabeth Kerekere, LGBTQIA, LGBTQ+, Pride, queer, sexuality, gender, identity, sex, relationships, families, family, community, Aotearoa, New Zealand, oppression, enby, NB, nonbinary, homosexuality, bisexuality, pansexuality, polyamory, heterosexuality, trans, intersex, rainbow people, genderfluid, fluidity, oppressed languages, minority languages, gender stereotypes, masculinity, femininity, monolingual, multilingual, loanwords, gender fluid, society, Christianity, Christian, religious, colonialism, colonial, Survival, colonisation, English, invasion, war, translation, Māori, takatāpui, Britain, British, UK, annexation, Treaty of Waitangi, urbanisation, whiteness, white privilege, privilege, English problematic fave, punishment, corporal punishment, shame, sailors, settlers, Maori Land Wars, art, carvings, bowdlerization, storytelling, story, stories, oral, oral tradition, writing systems, Roman alphabet, written, music, songs, singing, lyrics, whakataukī, proverbs, sayings, metaphor, imagery, genitalia, genitals, male, female, orthography, pronunciation, auscultation, stoats, laments, lost language, pronouns, context, gendered pronouns, erasure

Tranquillusionist: Nmgiiea transcript

March 23, 2020 The Allusionist

This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, for the purposes of quelling anxiety and stress and sleeplessness, read the lyrics to ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon, with the words arranged in reverse alphabetical order.

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In Tranquillusionist, transcript Tags Helen Zaltzman, words, language, serene, serenity, ASMR, calm, calmness, meditation, sleep, mood, emergency, Tranquillusionist, John Lennon, Imagine, lyrics, songs, music

Allusionist 22: Vocables - transcript

October 21, 2015 The Allusionist

In normal speech, vocables perform various functions - for instance, 'um' and 'ah' buy us time to think, and paper over cracks in our phrases; and babies testing out their vocal cords tend to be pretty keen on the vocables. Not sure they have a wealth of alternatives at that stage, to be honest. So in speech, vocables aren’t meaningful, or consequential, or even intentional - but in song, they can be all these things. All those la la las and dum di dums and bom bom do be de doos are ubiquitous in songs - so what are they doing there?

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In transcript Tags words, language, linguistics, Song Exploder, Hrishikesh Hirway, Tony Hazzard, lyrics, music, songwriting, songwriters, vocals, vocables, singing, singers, jazz, scat singing, scatting, Ella Fitzgerald, JLS, la
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Featured
Festivelusionists
Allusionist 221. Scribe
Allusionist 221. Scribe
Allusionist 220. Disobedience
Allusionist 220. Disobedience
Allusionist 219. Making Trouble
Allusionist 219. Making Trouble
Allusionist 218. Banned Books
Allusionist 218. Banned Books
Allusionist 217. Bread and Roses, and Coffee
Allusionist 217. Bread and Roses, and Coffee
Allusionist 216. Four Letter Words: Terisk
Allusionist 216. Four Letter Words: Terisk
Allusionist 215. Two-Letter Words
Allusionist 215. Two-Letter Words
Allusionist 214. Four Letter Words: Bane Bain Bath
Allusionist 214. Four Letter Words: Bane Bain Bath
Souvenirs on BBC Radio 4
Souvenirs on BBC Radio 4
Allusionist 213. Four Letter Words: Dino
Allusionist 213. Four Letter Words: Dino
Allusionist 212. Four Letter Words: Park
Allusionist 212. Four Letter Words: Park
Allusionist 211. Four Letter Words: -gate
Allusionist 211. Four Letter Words: -gate
Allusionist 210. Four Letter Words: 4x4x4 Quiz
Allusionist 210. Four Letter Words: 4x4x4 Quiz
queer playlist
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The Allusionist by Helen Zaltzman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.