Allusionist 144 Aro Ace transcript

October 26, 2021 The Allusionist

HZ: How did it feel when you found the vocabulary to explain yourself?

LEWIS BROWN: Oh, it was so good. I think it's maybe a bit of a cliche to say, but it was like I'd found a puzzle piece. And I was like, "Oh! That makes sense. Right. Yeah. You know, that checks out." It really helps, I think, to have to have a term for it. Before I had words like aromantic and asexual, I don't know, I just had a bad feeling. When I assumed that I did feel attracted to other people and I was kind of thinking, do I just have some trauma or something? Am I just a selfish person? And these are a cruel things to be thinking about yourself. And then I was like, oh, wait, no, no I don't. I can think of all the ways in which I'm a pretty giving person. I care about the people that I care about quite a lot. Just not necessarily in the way that everyone thinks is the most important way.

Allusionist 129 Sorry transcript

January 31, 2021 The Allusionist

MARJORIE INGALL: We dislike "for any hurt caused", "for anyone who was offended", because the "any" implies maybe it was no one. And it's clear that if you're apologising, someone was offended. It's not in any sort of airy-fairy situation. That's another way, again, it's all about distancing yourself from what you did.
HZ: Yeah, and removing agency.
MARJORIE INGALL: Yes.
SUSAN McCARTHY: If your castle is surrounded by people shouting with pitchforks and torches, and you're up on the battlements shouting, "Sorry if I caused any offence," you know you caused offence.

Allusionist 126 Survival: Custodians of the Languages transcript

November 28, 2020 The Allusionist

RUDI BREMER: One aspect of of what happened in Australia, as far as colonisation, is the assimilation policy. And in broad strokes, the way that that worked was Aboriginal people were rounded up, and taken from their land and placed on missions. And from there you were forced to only speak English. You couldn't teach your children your language, you couldn't teach them your culture.

Allusionist 120 Shine Theory transcript

July 30, 2020 The Allusionist

AMINATOU SOW: Hi. We are Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow, and we are the authors of the book Big Friendship, as well as the hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend.

HZ: And at some point between 2009, when they met and befriended each other, and 2013, when Ann used it in an article in New York Magazine, Aminatou and Ann coined the term Shine Theory.

ANN FRIEDMAN: I think this is just something that, you know, you probably said to me first, “I don't shine if you don't shine.” And then it became a thing we said frequently to each other and to other friends.

AMINATOU SOW: I will confess that it is the lyric from the Killers album that I just enjoyed a lot.

Allusionist 118 Survival: Bequest transcript

July 4, 2020 The Allusionist

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.

Allusionist 101. Two or More - transcript

June 24, 2019 The Allusionist

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.

Allusionist 88. Name Changers - transcript

November 2, 2018 The Allusionist

I changed my name because my parents spelled it wrong.

Why did I change my name? I didn't like it!

I have legally changed my name twice now, first and last. My parents tell this cute story about choosing my name the night before I was born. But as I was growing up, it was one of the most common names for female dogs.

I found out when I was about 12 that I was actually named for an actress that my dad had had a crush on when he was a kid, so I thought that was a bit weird and I didn't really want to hang on to that.

When I was born my parents could not agree on a name for me, and on their last day in the hospital after I was born they were watching the news and there was a missing children's report on the TV with a little girl named Ashleigh, and I was named after her.

Choosing a new name allowed me to drop a lot of the old baggage with the old identity without feeling as though I were betraying it.

Allusionist 31: Post-Love - transcript

March 6, 2016 The Allusionist

WOMAN 1: I once had a guy break up with me by saying, “I no longer feel comfortable accepting your love."

MAN 2: I once told a woman I was dating that I needed to break up with her because she “wasn’t broken enough.” I feel like a real shithead about it.

Allusionist 29: WLTM part II - transcript

February 3, 2016 The Allusionist

HZ: Every dating site has its own algorithm which matches you with others based on the information you enter into your profile. But language is a vast, nuanced palette, and an algorithm can’t necessarily grasp what you mean with total accuracy - and you might not have supplied total accuracy either.

AW: We all answer in an aspirational way, we don’t answer honestly; it’s really hard to be honest. So you wind up with a blob of language that gets associated with somebody else’s blob of language, and a lot of it is fiction. I’m not saying people are intentionally lying; but you wind up trying to match a version of the person, rather than the person themself. So you’re invariably going to wind up with bad matches.

Allusionist 28: WLTM part I - transcript

January 27, 2016 The Allusionist

FB: In the beginning, lonely hearts ads were pretty simple. A man wanted a woman who was young, and ideally had some money. A woman wanted a man who had some money, and that was it.
Lots of the language men will use in their ads is just different ways of saying ‘fertile’. They’ll say healthy, glowing, young - and a lot of the language women use is different ways of saying ‘has money to support offspring’.
For so many centuries, marriage had just been a business transaction. There was one in the Dorset County Chronicle in 1824 that said, “I want a woman to look after the pigs while I’m at work.”