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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 80. Warm Front - transcript

June 15, 2018 The Allusionist
A80+Warm+Front+logo.jpg

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.

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In transcript Tags words, language, communication, science, weather, meteorology, meteor, meteorologist, science communication, scicomm, clouds, rain, storms, cyclones, weather forecasts, television, TV, Australia, jargon, terminology, emotion, facts, wind, climate, showers, sun, sultry, knots, Beaufort Scale, numbers, sky, Nate Byrne, ABC
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The Allusionist by Helen Zaltzman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.