RH: People like words that sound silly. Compound words that have a lot of elements to them, like ‘catawampus’ - people are always going to love ‘catawampus’, and I think it’s just how it sounds, those Lewis Carroll-esque words that are just fun to say. We recently did ‘waffle stompers’, it’s just one of those words that has that je ne sais quoi, so silly you know you’re going to get a rise out of people. In a good way. Waffle stompers are hiking boots. Why would you ever say ‘hiking boots’ again?
JS: We had a lot of cat words.
RH: I don’t know if it was a lot, but we’re not afraid to pander occasionally.
JS: The internet loves cats…
Allusionist 34: Continental - transcript
If a continent is a continuous land, are all islands continents? Even tiny ones like Guernsey? No offence to Guernsey, but I don’t think Guernsey would call itself a continent for fear of being laughed out of the Channel.
Read moreAllusionist 33: Please - transcript
Growing up in England reading American books and watching American films and TV, I deduced that 'pants', 'biscuit', 'chips' and 'fanny' don’t mean the same in the US as they did at home. But I thought I was on familiar ground with the word ‘please’. Technically ‘please’ does mean the same thing in both places, but I had absolutely no idea it is deployed quite differently on our respective sides of the Atlantic.
Until the piñata of my ignorance was smashed open by linguist Lynne Murphy, who has been researching ‘please’.
LYNNE MURPHY: Several people have observed that the British say ‘please’ twice as much as Americans do. But they generally hadn’t looked at if there was a reason for that, other than assuming the British are more polite - more particularly, the English are more polite than Americans. So we wanted to go in and look at when British and American people are using ‘please’, and see if it’s just that Americans don’t bother so much, or are they using the word for different jobs?
Read moreAllusionist 32: Soho - transcript
HZ: There are several Sohos around the world: as well as that New York one, there’s one in Tampa, Florida, short for South Howard Avenue; the entertainment district in Hong Kong is another acraname, from South of Hollywood Road.
I think if you break down these acranames into their original components, they’re weak, aren’t they? Not particularly distinctive words or places. I put it to you that they are backranames - local features are backwards-engineered to fit a snappy name, already familiar from the first known Soho, here in London.
TONY SHRIMPLIN: It’s like all roads lead to Rome: all roads lead to Soho. It has this very special place. It’s the centre and heart of London. It’s a microcosm of the world, concentrated into ¾ of a square mile.
Read moreAllusionist 31: Post-Love - transcript
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.
Read moreAllusionist 30: US Election Lexicon - transcript
I’m pretty sure the 2016 US election has been going on for seven years already, but apparently it’s still nowhere near over. So we’re going to go for a brisk walk-and-talk through the corridors of the dictionary to find out a little about some political vocabulary.
Read moreAllusionist 29: WLTM part II - transcript
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.
Read moreAllusionist 28: WLTM part I - transcript
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.”
Allusionist 27: Bonus 2015 - transcript
Sometimes the false etymology is so fun, I want to believe it, even though I don’t, as in this request from Gav for the origin of the term “You’re fired” as it relates to employment. One ambitious suggestion is that in the early 20th century, John H Patterson, the founder of the National Cash Register company - which was a big deal in those days - was such a harsh boss, he used to communicate to employees that they were no longer required by taking their desks outside and setting fire to them.
Read moreAllusionist 26: Xmas Man - transcript
GREG JENNER: Some Victorian Christmas cards were utterly bonkers. My favourite one just had some bacon attached to it. There’s another one which had a dead mouse on the front. My favourite was a policeman being attacked by a clown with a red hot poker. Another is some children at their parents’ funeral. Classic Christmas fare! There’s one with two children being attacked by a giant wasp…
Read moreAllusionist 25: Toki Pona - transcript
Allusionist 24: Spill Your Guts - transcript
NK: I definitely wish I would’ve kept a journal in my elementary, junior high and high school years. You know, when you have so many years removed from certain periods of your life, you don’t really remember what it was really like. Your brain eliminates so many memories, you’re only left with specific moments. What a diary gives you is these moments of minutiae, which you managed to write down. The minutiae open up a part of your memory that is more deeply locked away, and allows you to connect to who you were as a kid which your normal memory can’t do.
Read moreAllusionist 23: Criminallusionist - transcript
There’s a tricky linguistic balance to strike in crime journalism. At one end, there is a linguistic style which is so dry and technical it makes the story sound, well, boring, and there’s also some danger of making it seem detached from the real damage it caused to people. At the other end of the scale, there’s crime reporting that is as splashy and sensational as fiction.
Read moreAllusionist 22: Vocables - transcript
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?
Read moreAllusionist 21: Eponyms I: The Ballad of Bic and Biro
JW: László Bíró would hear people say the ballpoint was ruining writing skills, and he’d smile and say, “Well, if writing comes from the heart, if we can help the hand to perform the hand to perform the task, what’s so wrong with that?” And I think there’s nothing wrong with that. Well done László Bíró.
HZ: I think it’s also interesting that Bíró and Bic's names are on products that are hugely successful, but rarely the centre of attention - and also disposable.
JW: Yeah. And also they are kind of disposable, in that you can know what a Bic or a Biro is, but you don’t need to know who Marcel is or who László is. They’ve made this disposable contribution to history, and in the same way made themselves disposable.
