HZ: Wolfsbane, fleabane, bugbane, dogbane, leopard’s bane. All these plants are poisonous.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Are these poisonous to those specific creatures?
HZ: It would be amazing to discover that a plant is poisonous only to leopards.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: “I fed it to my dog fine. Pet leopard, no.”
HZ: "I just need something to keep all these leopards out my flowerbeds, but I want the squirrels to be okay."
Allusionist 213. Four Letter Words: Dino transcript
lot of dinosaur names as well are just being factual about size, like ‘mega’ - and actually a lot of the names are being factual about other things, like triceratops and pentaceratops: that's descriptive. Three horns; five horns.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Five horns. We're always telling you about the number of horns. And then a lot of them are just like, “We found this in this place.”
HZ: Yeah. The albertosaurus -
HANNAH McGREGOR: Albertosaurus!
HZ: - in Alberta. And, mastodon is meant nipple tooth, or nipple teeth.
HANNAH McGREGOR: …Sorry?
HZ: You look a little perturbed,
HANNAH McGREGOR: Perturbed and delighted. Vagina dentata is a sort of recurring theme -
HZ: It's a passion of yours.
HANNAH McGREGOR: It’s a passion of mine! Ha ha ha. Yeah, yeah, you know what? You're not wrong. It's a recurring theme in the book and my life. and so I'm really, I am intrigued by the idea of adding nipple teeth into the equation.
Read moreAllusionist 212. Four Letter Words: Park transcript
HZ: What is a park?
JUSTIN McELROY: I think ultimately a park is… and it's funny because people sometimes debate: should there be grass, should there be trees? Should there be a playground? Does it need to be a certain size? A park can be anything, that's part of the wonderful flexibility of how we use public spaces. I think, fundamentally, so long as it's a public space that people can hang out in and do a variety of activities, then you got yourself a park.
HZ: Even if those activities aren't hunting? You'll accept?
JUSTIN McELROY: I'll accept, because we're no longer in 17th century Britain. But I traveled the world for the last year before coming back to Vancouver. And every country, every city has different things that they think is an ideal park, and you can see that shape the set-up. But that ability to be different things, I think, is the shining example for what makes them universal.
HZ: Vancouver is a bit imbalanced because it has a lot of little parks and then one massive park at Stanley Park.
JUSTIN McELROY: And Stanley Park is the best park in the city. It might be the best urban park in the world, when you consider just how big it is, the range of things you can do.
HZ: Yeah, they filmed Twilight there.
JUSTIN McELROY: Ha! The amazing views that you have of the mountains and the ocean and the city, that you can jog, that you can bike, that you can walk, that you can see all different sorts of gardens and playgrounds: it's absolutely phenomenal, and an absolute jewel. And it's fun to contrast that with the other 242 parks. They can't all be winners, but they're all doing something.
Read moreAllusionist 211. Four Letter Words: -gate transcript
The Watergate Scandal’s linguistic legacy: the suffix ‘-gate’
Read moreAllusionist 210. Four Letter Words: 4x4x4 Quiz transcript
Four Letter Word season continues, and this time we do not require explicit tags or content warnings, because our four-letter word is QUIZ! Or rather, today we have a quiz about four letter words.
Read moreAllusionist 209. Four Letter Words: Serving C-bomb transcript
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.
Read moreAllusionist 208. Four Letter Words: Four Letter Words: Ffff
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’.
Read moreAllusionist 207. Randomly Selected Words from the Dictionary
Today’s episode is in the Tranquillusionist style, to give your brain a break while I say words that are not too consequential over a soothing backing track. And this time, the words are all the randomly selected words from the dictionary from every episode of the show, in reverse chronological order.
Read moreAllusionist 206. Bonus 2024 transcript
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, have been stashing away special Allusiobits all year, when the people who appeared on the show said interesting things that I couldn’t fit into their episode because there wasn’t room or it was not about language - waiting, just waiting, for this, the annual Bonus episode! This year we’ve got something called the ‘universal blank’, which actually does not refer to my emotions; we’ve got tricorn hats, poets with migraines, and why Boston cream pie isn’t a pie. And so much more.
Read moreAllusionist 205. Lexicat, part 2 transcript
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Elsie does lie. I had just given her the "sleepy" button and I was in the kitchen. I was making lunch, and she goes to the button board and she says, "bedroom, sleepy, lie down." I'm like, "What a great contextual use. Yes, absolutely. Let's go take a little nap," and walk into the bedroom. And my cat doesn't come in, and I come back - and she's eating my cheese sandwich. And she has, multiple times, tried to send me out of the room in order to get my food. So when I'm making lunch and she starts talking to me and it's something like, “Go check the litter box” or something like that, food goes into the microwave and then I investigate whatever's happening.
HZ: How did that make you feel? You're like, “I can never trust her again?”
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: I don't know. I was like, oh, right. Cat.
Allusionist 204. Lexicat, part 1 transcript
HZ: It's a lot of deductive reasoning happening with how she's using language. Fascinating.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Yeah, it really is - which is why, when I get comments on videos where it's like, “Oh, this cat is just walking across buttons randomly,” I'm like, no, I have a dog that does that. I daily have moments where I'm like, okay, no, this is really a thing that's happening.
Allusionist 203. Flyting transcript
ISHBEL McFARLANE: “You crap so much that you sunk a ship you were on.”
HZ: I’m gonna use that.
Allusionist 202. Singlish Singlish transcript
GWEE LI SUI: We have not yet known what it's capable of. Singlish is one of those things the potential of which we're yet to tap in properly. There can be so many things you can do with it.
Read moreAllusionist 201. Singlish transcript
BIBEK GURUNG: You grow up with the sense that if your first language, or one of your first languages, Singlish, actually a bad version of an already existing language, you kind of get this sense that “I'm just bad at language,” which is… language is a fundamental human skill. It's what separates us from the lemurs or whatever. And to just have this sense that you're bad at this very fundamental skill, I think, really does a number to your self esteem and your abilities to communicate in general. I still have a lot of - I don't know how to phrase it, maybe like cultural cringe - around Singlish. And when I meet someone from Singapore, we do sort of lapse into Singlish and communicate in that way, except if I'm with American friends and then I just feel so self conscious and I'm not able to do it. As a student of linguistics and someone who just knows about the sociolinguistic dynamics, I still find it really hard to shake.
Read moreTranquillusionist: Ex-Constellations transcript
Let’s hear it for some of the constellations that we used to have but are now ex-constellations.
Read more