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A PODCAST ABOUT LANGUAGE
BY HELEN ZALTZMAN

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Allusionist 209. Four Letter Words: Serving C-bomb transcript

May 25, 2025 The Allusionist

Things have changed for a word that despite being around in written text for 900+ years, didn’t even get listed in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1972.

NICOLE HOLLIDAY: I never say this word.

HZ: No, I feel bad to force you.

NICOLE HOLLIDAY: No, it's funny. Well, I'll say it on podcast, this is professional environment; but in my normal daily life, I can't imagine that I would personally say it. And this might just be like, I'm kind of a prude and I was raised kind of religious, but it does sort of seem like beyond the pale for me personally. I wonder if were 20 if I wouldn’t feel that way, but I spent so much of my life like judiciously avoiding very strong taboos. And this one, just my gut reaction is that it overwhelms. So when you asked me to do this, I was like, “Oh, no! I have to say that word!”

HZ: I'm sorry. We could probably skirt around it and then people can spend the whole episode trying to guess which word we're talking about.

Allusionist 208. Four Letter Words: Four Letter Words: Ffff

May 11, 2025 The Allusionist

If you’re thinking, “How the fuck can you write a whole 500-page dictionary just about the word ‘fuck’?” consider, say, the many meanings of ‘ass fuck’, noun and verb - and that’s before you even add similar terms like ‘bumfuck’ and ‘buttfuck’. And there are so many less usual terms, like ‘fucksome’ or ‘fuckstrated’ or ‘fuckist’ or ‘fucktious’.

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 198. Queer Arab Glossary

August 12, 2024 The Allusionist

HZ: So how do you go about building a glossary when you have to do that yourself from scratch?
MARWAN KAABOUR: Yes, it's a good question. Like, why would a graphic designer with a steady job decide to open this can of worms?

Allusionist 185 Gems and Patties transcript

November 21, 2023 The Allusionist

I've got a doctorate in this, and I have got dwarfism, but there'll always be an average-sized person whose only recollection of dwarfism is through Snow White, and yet somehow they'll construct themselves as the expert, and tell you it's not offensive or, “No, you've got that wrong.”

HZ: Also by having it on bags of sweets, that's kind of the ultimate “It's okay to say this in normal conversation”.

ERIN PRITCHARD: Yeah. But you do get through to some people, some people go, “I never realised that. I never knew that.”

Allusionist 122 Ghostwriter transcript

September 28, 2020 The Allusionist

BUFFON: I was like, am I supposed to punch her?
MPUTUBWELE: Nelly knows this is the word for ghostwriter.
BUFFON: Everybody knows that word in France.
MPUTUBWELE: But it's one thing to know that word, and it's another to hear it said to you.

Allusionist 119. Blood Is Not Water transcript

July 14, 2020 The Allusionist

ANTHONY RUSSELL: I want to have a vocabulary in order to be able to talk about things that directly affect me as an as an African-American, and as a black Jew, and as a Jew, I should have I should be able to talk about things that affect my life.

Allusionist 117 Many Ways At Once transcript

June 16, 2020 The Allusionist

HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: Our behaviour and our desires will always exceed any terminology that anyone can come up with. And so rather than trying to find the right terms - and this for me is like what working in, what trying to come up with an LGBT Scots glossary does: it's a chance to imagine. It's a chance not to come up with the right way of saying things, but to say: what if we thought about it this way? What if we thought about it that way? What assumptions are built into the languages that we use?