Allusionist 3 Going Viral transcript

Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/viral.

HZ: This is The Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, smash the piggy bank of language to count the coins within. Coming up in today's show...

TOM PHILLIPS: You know, peoples' ovaries are not actually exploding because Benedict Cumberbatch has sort of winked at a camera.

HZ: Let's prepare ourselves with a little light word history. I was looking up the word "broad", as in "an immoral or ribald woman," and, as is often the case with slang words, its origins are annoyingly inconclusive. It might have been suggesting that the woman in question's pelvis was broad, or it might have been an abbreviation of "broadwife," that is, a woman who was away from her husband and thus available to other men. But here's a curious fact. Because "broad" was so insulting to women, in the 1960s the athletic event then-known as the "broad jump" was renamed the long jump. And yet slag heaps are still called "slag" heaps. Very inconsistent. On with the show.

---

HZ: Remember when the word "viral" only meant something bad? From its ancient Proto-Indo-European root, "virus" turned up in many languages to mean "poison" or "slime". However, in my lifetime, the word "viral" has evolved from describing diseases, to things that would scupper your computer, to your office's lip dub of "Call Me Maybe" getting viewed 14 million times on YouTube since yesterday. It's hard to identify the exact person who coined this latter linguistic mutation, but by the mid-1990s people studying and writing about marketing were propagating the use of "viral" to mean "rapidly spreading popularity".

ROMAN MARS: Viral as a metaphor... I find it to be wrong.

HZ: There's Roman Mars, but not the Roman Mars familiar to you as the host of 99% Invisible, but the parallel universe Roman Mars who didn't go into audio, eventually to become our Radiotopia overlord, but instead stuck with his PhD in genetics.

ROMAN MARS: It's bad. It's like a bad metaphor in a lot of ways, because often the immediacy and efficacy of viruses means that they phase out even quicker, and so the desire for virality is weird, considering that really good viruses, you don't notice really good viruses. You know, like a lot of our DNA is of probably a viral origin, and we don't even know it.

HZ: Not being noticed would be the opposite of success for viral web content, and while many virals happen by accident, I doubt Cat Bin Woman anticipated millions of people would see a video of her crime of throwing away her cat into a rubbish bin. All over the internet, people are trying to make content go viral. And of course, one of the world's most successful generators of viral content is BuzzFeed. Every day, its staff members churn out hundreds of articles, lists, quizzes, and videos to be disseminated by social media users. And them doing so is probably just down to whether or not they're grabbed by the headline. So how do BuzzFeed capture someone's attention in just a few words? To find out, I met up with Tom Phillips, editorial director at BuzzFeed UK, and what happened next will blow your mind. 

TOM PHILLIPS: I mean, the thing with "blow your mind" is we don't tend to use "blow your mind" too much. There was this sort of headline style that was all over the internet for a long time recently, which was the "curiosity gap" headline. The stereotype of it is that, "This young boy with something slightly wrong with him was bullied, and then he decided to stand up himself. You won't believe what happened next!" That was a successful approach for many sites for a long time. I once, still one of my most read posts is one where I, the one time I tried out. I just wanted to see if it would work. By and large, we reject the curiosity gap approach. We're much more in favour of actually saying the thing that happened, and the headline being informative. Even if you don't actually click through to the story and read it all, the headline should actually inform you, rather than tease you or trick you or anything like that. 

HZ: Yes. Set you up for disappointment. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Exactly. 

HZ: When you believe what happened next. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Exactly. One thing we do, which I think people often confuse with that curiosity gap stuff, is we do use hyperbole quite a bit. Not so much on the news reporting side, because that doesn't really work with news values, but on the entertainment side, on the classic BuzzFeed, is like: "Beyoncé has just released a new song. I'm dead. I died. Right there, I'm dead now." And everybody in that audience knows about that, and understands that this is hyperbole, and that, you know, these people have not actually died, and that peoples' ovaries are not actually exploding because Benedict Cumberbatch has sort of winked at a camera. 

You can actually have some fun with ones that are a bit more sort of laid back. Like there was one post that did incredibly well, which was just about sort of the scale of the Solar System and the universe and things like that, and it was just sort of "26 pictures that will make you re-evaluate your place in the world," or something like that. It was weirdly sort of underplayed. Maybe a year, two years ago, like that would have been a, "Will blow your mind," kind of approach. 

HZ: The opposite of hyperbole is "litotes", the use of understatement for rhetorical effect. Whenever you say something like, for example, "Yeah, the view from the top of the Empire State Building is not bad," or you refer to a raging hotty as, "A bit of all right," congratulate yourself for your use of litotes, building on thousands of years of literary tradition. And maybe, if people are becoming desensitised to the hysterical pitch of headlines, litotes will be the next trend in viral content. 

TOM PHILLIPS: I think there's going to be a natural ebb and flow of this. People will start to associate sort of more hyperbolic headlines with the likelihood of disappointment, at the far end, and so understated can then sort of rise up, rise up, rise up. And then once sort of understated takes over, then there's a gap in the market. There's an ecological niche for people being hyperbolic again, and they'll get success, and it'll be a sort of a constant ebb and flow of hyperbole versus understatement. 

Somewhere we've got a spreadsheet of superlatives and words that are alternatives, so that we don't keep going to sort of like "jaw-dropping", "amazing", "the best X you will see today", that kind of thing, because while hyperbole is part of the language of a large part of our audience, and they understand that, it has to be inventive, it has to be creative, and it has to not be bullshit. It has to be something that everybody gets instinctively. And so you've got to keep playing with it. And if there is a glut of "amazing"s on the homepage, then it just, you look dumb. And so you do sort of very deliberately try to sort of play around with the language and just try things out. 

And that's the other thing about what we do, is that a lot of what we do is experimental. Basically, every post you'll go in like, "OK, we know that something like this does well, maybe if there's a little twist on it, if you phrase it slightly different, might it do better, will it do worse?" That sort of thing. We have a data team who are very, very good, and they actually sort of do deep analysis of, you know, what works, what doesn't, why people click, why people share. All that sort of thing. But a lot of these experiments we do are a lot more sort of ad-hoc and slightly loose, and you never quite know. You can never be entirely certain. It's like, you know, "Did that phrasing actually help it, or is it just once again the random fluctuations of the internet?" The internet will always surprise and horrify you, and there is a very common thing where you're just going like, "Internet, you liked this stuff last week, why don't you like it now?"

HZ: Because it's capricious, Tom. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Exactly. The internet is a capricious and wilful beast. 

HZ: How do you keep up with that?

TOM PHILLIPS: You feel your way through and start to get a sense of, "That kind of phrasing is popular right now, that kind of phrasing resonates with people." And then after a while it will stop resonating, and you move on to something else. 

HZ: The lifecycle of a particular word or phrase is hastened by its own success. The more it is shared, the more people see it, the more sites copy it, and the quicker everyone is sick of it. But some terms don't seem to burn out too quickly. 

TOM PHILLIPS: The word "actually". Just adding that to otherwise innocuous headlines seemed, for a while, I don't know if it's still happening, but seemed for a while definitely make them better. Like so, you know, like simple quizzes, like rather than sort of, "Which kind of Beyoncé are you?" - "Which kind of Beyoncé are you, actually?"

HZ: Because you've been labouring under a misapprehension for all this time.

TOM PHILLIPS: We will test out different headlines for pieces and sort of see if any of them do better. We had a series of posts recently on why living in a place "will ruin you for life", the whole point being that these are just very pretty pictures of a certain area and what it's like, you know, it will never be as good again living anywhere else. And "ruin your life" was really, really successful for a while, and then, until recently, it seems that "reasons you should never leave place" has kind of sort of come up behind it. 

HZ: Oh, a positive spin. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it is interesting actually that the "ruin you for life" framing was successful, because we find the one thing that rarely works is any sort of level of sarcasm or irony, which is very interesting given that sarcasm and irony are like almost the default modes of discussion on many, many parts of the internet. But weirdly, it doesn't seem that using them in headlines makes them go particularly viral, which is an interesting thing to me. Like, we tried it many, many times, and it's always been the case that the straightforward, "This is what this is," headline will do better than the one that sort of turns it round, sort of inverts your expectations and does clever stuff with it, and is slightly distanced and a little bit arch. 

HZ: Maybe people, out of context, won't necessarily register the double meanings. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Exactly. I think this is the point, that when you're in the article you may get it, but a lot people won't come to the article because they think that it's... 

HZ: Mean. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Yeah, they think, or, alternatively, positive about something you should be positive about, you know, but they either won't go into it because they don't get it in the first place, or once they're out of it they will be worried about sharing it, because they think that other people will misinterpret them.

HZ: Why are people gripped by the urge to share this kind of content, rather than just reading it and moving on? 

TOM PHILLIPS: A lot of what we do is based around identity and how people express their identity. 

HZ: So you're providing people tools to set out their stall. 

TOM PHILLIPS: Exactly. And that can be, you know, from sort of the classic BuzzFeed posts, you know, "27 things that only people from Des Moines will understand"... 

HZ: What's with all the odd numbers, Tom? 

TOM PHILLIPS: We generally find that, for a start, non-rounds numbers do well. It seems we get into a terrible fuss if we're sort of creating a numbered list post and we end up on like sort of 20 things, because of like, "No, it's a round number." The odd numbers vs. even numbers thing, we have completely evidence-free discussions in the office about the idea that even numbers are better for nice things, and odd numbers are better for sort of weird, strange, or nasty things. Basically, people will sort of say, "Yeah, I did that one post that was odd-numbered, and that did fairly well, and then that post with an even number, that didn't do so well, so I'm going to invent an entire theory of mind to explain the random fluctuations of the internet." 

HZ: So even when you're an organisation dedicated to producing viral content, success is still largely trial and error. Something that seems to be fairly consistent, however, is the notion that audio does not go viral. Photos, written post, some videos, even videos with no visual interest go viral all the time. But aside from recordings of customers' frustrated calls to Comcast, audio alone rarely does. Well, Roman Mars takes exception to that, too. 

ROMAN MARS: I think it's dumb. Podcasts, that's really viral in the good sense. So like, it's about a decision, like of what type of virus you want to be. My type of virus is the one that you sign up for it once, and you have it forever. I'm like herpes, and they want us to be Ebola. And I don't get why you'd want to be Ebola. Ebola gets eradicated. Ebola doesn't spread far. Like I'd rather be herpes. 

HZ: Strong message to end on. 

[SLOW ACOUSTIC COVER OF "FRIDAY" BY REBECCA BLACK PLAYS]

HZ: Before we go, your randomly-selected word from the dictionary today is…

Bavardage. Noun. Rare noun, meaning idle gossip.

Try using it in an email today.

If you want, you can get in touch with me by seeking out @AllusionistShow on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks to all of you who've already been in contact since the show launched, especially Benjamin, who after the last episode about bras tweeted to tell me that his great-grandmother refused to wear a bra on the grounds that they were, "Evil, like the transistor radio." Perhaps she'd been picking up radio waves in her underwires?

This show resides at theallusionist.org. Thanks to Tom Phillips and Roman Mars. This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, and there'll be another one along in two weeks' time.

Allusionist 2 Bosom Holder transcript

Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/bras.

HZ: Welcome to The Allusionist, a show from Radiotopia from PRX, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, pull up language's skirts and laugh at its underpants. Coming up in today's show... 

CLIP: To lift and separate. You're suddenly shapelier. 

HZ: Sort of. To warm-up, here's some word history. Let's learn why ladies' busts are called "busts". It's not because they're busted. It's a reference to the sculpture of the same name, you know, with a head on top of a fraction of chest. The bust stops tactfully before the sculptor had to contend with any nipples. These busts were often found on tombs to commemorate the occupants, so they got their name from "bustom", a Latin word that meant "tomb" or "corpse", which itself descended from the Latin for "funeral pyre, or the place where bodies are burned". 

So now, my mind's eye keeps picturing a woman's bust with a miniature cremation ceremony taking place on it. Thanks a bunch, etymology. Yet again, you ruin everything. On with the show. 

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HZ: There are loads of synonyms for underwear. "Undergarments", "foundation garments", "scanties", "intimates", "unmentionables", "lingerie", "skivvies", "smalls". And there are lots of synonyms for underpants. "Knickers", "undercrackers", "grundy's", "drawers", "panties", "bloomers", "briefs", "banana hammock". If you're getting turned on by this list, please switch off this podcast immediately and go for a brisk walk. There's also a huge variety of terms - slang, medical, and otherwise - for the body parts contained in underwear. But, when it comes to bras, are you going to use any other word than "bra"? "Yes, Helen, I called bras by their full name, 'brassiere'." No, you don't. I've never heard anybody use that word. 

The first time I encountered the word "brassiere" was as a child leafing through my picture dictionary. It was on the page about clothes. I thought it was very exotic, but that's pretty much the last time I've ever seen brassiere used as well. Officially, the first ever appearance of the word "brassiere", to mean a lady's bra, occurred in Vogue magazine in 1907. But what kind of garment was this referring to? What were women wearing on their boobs in 1907? 

LORI SMITH: Corsets were getting shorter, or they were more moving down the body. 

HZ: This is Lori Smith from the London College of Fashion. Lori wrote her master's thesis on bras, so she really is the master of bras. 

LORI SMITH: So corsets used to cover the breasts as well. But then with fashions changing and skirts becoming slimmer, the corsets became a bit longer down the hips, and so that they weren't lumpy under the dress on the top half they finished underneath the boobs. So, of course, that sort of left a bit of a... You'd just have your dress on top of your naked skin. 

HZ: Filthy! 

LORI SMITH: And nobody wants to do that, no, very filthy. So, yes, to protect the clothes from the body underneath they put another layer in between, and so, yeah, the sort of shorter, chemise-like top just became the bra. It was, there were quite a lot of sort of "bust improvers" or "bust supporters" that maybe had a little bit of boning and stuff in to begin with, but then as the fashions got a little bit more kind of shear on the top half and you got kind of shirtwaisted blouses, the bra just became a little bit of lining really for underneath that, so you weren't being indecent. 

HZ: These brassieres were almost like extra blouses underneath women's actual blouses. 

LORI SMITH: If I find it... This is an advertisement which is apparently the first one that used the word "brassiere", but nobody seems to quite know why. 

HZ: The advert, in the 23rd of May 1907 edition of Vogue, for "DeBevoise brassieres and combination undergarments", shows four rather sleepy-looking women waiting around in their undies and outdoor shoes, as you do. Their wastes are the same size as their necks, while their chests are improbably-barrelly, as shapeless and overstuffed as if they'd each swallowed a large cushion. They certainly don't look fit for battle, even though "brassiere" was originally a French term for a piece of armour, deriving from the French word for arm, "bras". 

A "brassière" was an arm protector, and later on a breastplate. So presumably the word was chosen firstly because French words were considered sophisticated by underwear companies, secondly because it was worn on the same part of the body as a breastplate brassière, and thirdly because women's underwear was a lot like armour. Corsetry was reinforced with whalebone or metal. Lycra was a long way off. 

LORI SMITH: They were about shaping the body, and it also, very strangely, became thought of that rather than, as people might think now, that actually if you went around lacing yourself very tightly into things that actually, you know, maybe your core muscles, because having nothing to do, they might not be quite as strong because you were using the corset for support, but years ago they seemed to think that actually it was better to wear a corset, because it would help give you a good posture, and it would help children grow and to be kind of straight and strong. 

HZ: You heard right. Children wore corsets, girls and boys. 

Then men didn't go around wearing them. 

LORI SMITH: Very true. 

HZ: So they can't have been that good.

LORI SMITH: That is a very good point, yes. I wonder at what point a young boy would be able to ditch his corset and become a manly man that let it all hang out. 

HZ: That kind of underwear bar mitzvah or something. 

But a change was going to come to women's underpinnings. These kind of wearable prison cells were neither practical nor comfortable, and around the late 19th, early 20th century, feminist organisations such as the National Dress Reform Association were calling to emancipate women from their corsets, so that women would be able to do more things, like working, sticking votes into ballot boxes, and being able to move. And the clothes they wore over them were lightening up too, becoming less structured, and they were made of thinner fabrics.

In 1910, 19-year-old New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacob didn't want the look of her diaphanous evening dress to be ruined by the intrusions of the usual scaffolding beneath. So she grabbed two silk handkerchiefs, sewed them together, made straps out of pink ribbon, lashed on the garment, and sailed off, unimpeded, into the night. Her friends started begging her to make them these bras, too. They were a roaring success. And on the 3rd of November 1914, Mary Phelps Jacob was granted the patent for the brassiere, and thus she's the one who usually gets the credit for inventing the modern bra. This kind of bra really became popular during the First World War, because they needed to conserve metal. Plus, women were working in factories, which wasn't really compatible with rigid corsetry. Unlike present-day bras, promising uplift and cleavage fit to divert rivers down, women of this era actually wanted to flatten down their chests. 

LORI SMITH: The flappers mixed everything up, really. Yeah, the line of those clothes was just so different, and the corsets, by that time, it was still the same starting under the bust and going down across the hips. You would think that the 1920s, it was all kind of free and loose, but actually, I can't really tell whether it was that women didn't want to quite be that loose, because, having a slim line underneath your dress look quite nice, not everybody is completely free of lumps and bumps, as we all know, or whether it was the people in corsetry departments going, "Ooh, no, well, actually it'll look much better if you don't completely ditch the corsets, and go with these fabulous new things called girdles, with elastic panels in." But of course they had all the same steel boning as the corsets, it was just ever-so-slightly more comfortable to wear, but on the top half, obviously, because of the more sort of boyish shape, the little chemise-type brassiere underneath just became a very sort of flattening bandeau, because all you wanted to do was just squash everything flat so that your lovely dresses just hung straight down from the shoulders. 

When you got into the 1930s, and the fashions changed again from the sort of flat, boyish styles in the 20s and went to a more, I hate the word, but a more "womanly" silhouette, that's when the the flat bandeau bras, they started to use traditional dressmaking techniques with like different sort of darts and shaping to define the individual breasts and provide uplift. And that's when the obsession with uplift properly started, was in the 1930s. And also the 1930s was when "brassiere" got shortened to "bra" by pretty much everybody. 

HZ: They didn't have time. There was a war about to happen, they needed to save some syllables. 

LORI SMITH: Exactly. 

HZ: There was, of course, another significant linguistic moment for the word "bra" in the 20th century. Its affiliation with the word "burning".  

LORI SMITH: The bra-burning thing is a big old myth, really. It was protesters at the Miss America pageant who, as part of their protests, they were throwing things into a fire, one of which was a bra. But it was a symbolic thing. It wasn't like everyone was discarding their bras. Not for that reason anyway. A lot of people still wore bras, they just changed to have a softer look to them. A "natural" look, as they called it, so instead of all the kind of the structure and uplift and sort of pointiness that you would get in sort of the 50s and 60s, this was a kind of no-bra look. And yeah, there was a lot of shear fabrics, and kind of sort of looser-looking stuff in the 70s, but the vast majority of women didn't really get rid of them, and there's a lot of feminists I know that would never get rid of their bras. 

HZ: So the bra's reputation as a very political garment is undeserved, really? 

LORI SMITH: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. I think there's, you know, the focus should really be on other things, when it comes to the feminist fight. But yeah, it does seem to get reproduced in a lot of books, though. A lot of the books that have pictures of bras, they talk about the bra-burning and you think, "Well, hang on, why have we still got photos of bras from those decades if everyone burned them and didn't wear them?" 

CLIP: Wonderful Wonderbra. To be free and alive everywhere that you go is to wear what you dare anywhere and to travel with flair. You care about the shape you're in, so does he, so does he. Wonderful, wonderful Wonderbra.

HZ: A very liberating message in a 1969 advert for Wonderbra there. Bra master Lori Smith blogs about underwear and other things at rarelywearslipstick.com, and she tweets @LipstickLori. In case you were wondering earlier about all those underpants words and why they're all plural - apart from from "banana hammock", let's not dwell - it's because the garment itself used to be two halves, separate fabric legs tied together at the waist, but left open at the crotch. That's right. Queen Victoria wore split-crotch knickers. 

The Allusionist was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Lori Smith, Amber Butchart, and Greg Jenner. I've posted some pictures of old bras, by which I mean the historic old bras, not just some bras that should have been thrown out several years ago, on theallusionist.org, and if you want to chat about words in between episodes, find @allusionistshow on Facebook and Twitter. 

Your randomly-selected word from the dictionary today is…

Limnology. Noun. The study of lakes and other bodies of freshwater.

Try using it in an email today.

The show will be back in two weeks. Keep yourself well supported until then.

Allusionist 1 Ban the Pun transcript

Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/puns.

For Radiotopia from PRX, this is The Allusionist. That's Allusionist, with an "A", not an "I". I can't promise illusions, I can only promise little linguistic adventures for you, the listener, with me, Helen Zaltzman. Coming up in today's show, we'll put the "pun" into "punch myself in the head just to make the wordplay stop". 

To warm-up, here's some word history. And as this is the first episode of the show, let's begin with: "Hello". Or "hallo", "hollo", "hullo", depending on which one you favour. There are even some outliers who say "hillo". Regardless, the term probably started out with the Old High German shout of "halâ", or "holâ", which they used to hurl at ferrymen. This went through various iterations as something you'd bellow at people to get their attention, but the word really got its big break with the invention of the telephone. It was lightbulb fan Thomas Edison who endorsed "hello" as the thing to say when you picked up the phone. The telephone's inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, was keen for people to open with "ahoy". It would have made phone conversations a lot more piratical-sounding. And now, on with the show.

---

HZ: Towards the end of 2014, some news broke that devastated everyone around me. China was to ban puns. China has a very rich history of punning. The language is absolutely full of homophones, words and parts of words that sound like other words, and, until now, the people have taken advantage of that in their jokes and idioms and even customs. But the State Administration for Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television in China has ordered that, henceforth, all forms of media shall only use literal language. They must strictly only deploy idioms correctly and flush out irregular and inaccurate use of language. 

There are some fairly persistent mutterings that this move is not to shut down jokes, but subversion and criticism of the government. However, the regulator says that allowing wordplay to continue will cause cultural and linguistic chaos to flourish. Whatever it is, from now on, China is only allowed to deal in single entendre. No more puns. Now, despite my admiration for the principle of free speech, I have to admit that when I heard about this part of me thought, "Yeah, you go for it, China." I can't pretend to be a pun fan. I'm not made of stone, I do sometimes admit a few ripe puns myself, and every time I'm on the 432 bus through Tulse Hill and it passes the Thai restaurant "Thaicoons", I laugh. Inwardly. I don't hate all puns. I just hate nearly all puns. Surely the most important thing about a word is its meaning? Whereas that's almost an encumbrance to a pun, which reduces a word down to merely its superficial resemblance to another word. Admittedly, I can try to intellectualise my punner version, but I realise it's probably more visceral, because I spent my formative years growing up alongside the Puntifex himself. My brother Andy. 

[CLIP FROM THE BUGLE]

ANDY ZALTZMAN: I bet Lou Reed's wife couldn't believe it when he broke the news to her that they were gonna do this concert. I mean, she must've had to pinch herself... 

[OVER THE CLIP, STILL PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND]

HZ: Andy's a comedian. Here he is, embarking on one of his notorious pun runs, on his podcast The Bugle. The anguish you can hear in the background belongs to his long-suffering co-Bugler, John Oliver. 

[CLIP FROM THE BUGLE RESUMES]

ANDY ZALTZMAN: ...mastiff had to pinch herself, yep. "Concert for dogs, Lou?" She said, "I know you're avant-garde, but what's the point of that?"

But Lou Reed soon setter straight. He said, "Schnauzer's a time and a place for complaining. This is a great opportunity for us, dear. I terrier, we can't bassett up. I'll put the band together and whippet into shape."

"OK," she said, "but make sure it's a cosmopolitan band. Get an English guy on drums and someone from Tehran on rhythm guitars."

"Hang on, love, I'll just write that down. Pom, Iranian. Anyone else?"

"Yep, for backing vocals, get the lead singer from that influential synth-pop band, Kraftwerk, and maybe that famous American actress and occasional singer who starred in Moonlighting."

"OK, German, Shepherd."

"And on drums..."

"Hang on," interrupted Lou Reed, "dachshund-nuff...". 

[CLIP FADES OUT]

HZ: It goes on. For 40 years and counting. 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: There's a simple joy in the absolutely idiotic wordplay, and that has been true in comedy for thousands of years. Aristophanes had quite a few decent wordplays in his stuff.  

HZ: Really?  

ANDY ZALTZMAN: In 400 B.C. 

HZ: Were those puns meant to be experienced through reading, or were they meant to be said out loud? 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: All out loud. 

HZ: Right. 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: It's a, you know, theatrical performance. 

HZ: Do you think that is still the best way to deliver a pun? 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: Yeah. I mean, that was, would have been punning to 12,000 people on the side of a hill. 

HZ: If you're not conversant with Ancient Greek to the point where you can understand every idiom, does that mean you can just miss those puns? 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to guess it does if you're not an ancient Greek. 

HZ: So in 2,000 years' time, your puns could be just wasted. They might just take them all at single value. 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: No, I think you're being very, very premature on that. I mean, they're made to last, Helen. The sort of puns I do tend to be quite contrived.  

[CLIP FROM THE BUGLE]

ANDY ZALTZMAN: We live in a cynical age, John. And like a German research scientist looking at X-ray scans of people's stomachs in an investigation using barium-coated sausages to see how the digestive system works, we do tend to see the wurst in people. 

[CLIP ENDS]

ANDY ZALTZMAN: Oh, I'm not sure there's other forms of comedy in which you could necessarily achieve the same deluge of quips. 

HZ: Mmm. Is that one reason, then, why they're popular? Just because they're kind of easy, and you get a response? 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: I don't know if they're necessarily easy, to write a good one, but, yeah, I guess you can see the craft of it. I guess the sort of humour sometimes comes in the obvious contrivance, and a slight disbelief in an audience that someone has bothered to make that contrivance. Part of it is, I guess, them becoming more and more contrived as the sequence progresses. In the puns I do on The Bugle, where, you know, they tend to be, you know, sort of 20 to 40 in a row, in rapid succession.  

HZ: Are you not worried that you're using them all up too fast? 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: Well, I hope there's not a bottom to that well. 

[CLIP FROM THE BUGLE]

ANDY ZALTZMAN: Soon Laurie was ready to go. "O-kai, do you mind if I tell my friend, you know..."

JOHN OLIVER Oh, shame on you. 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: "...you know, the lady from number 35 who you really don't like?"

"What, shih tzu?"

"I wish you wouldn't call her that, dear. That's very rude."

JOHN OLIVER OK, that's good. That is good.

ANDY ZALTZMAN: "But anyway, why don't you like her?"

"Well, 'cos she talks rot, while her huge husband scares me. I mean, he's a big old bastard." Beagle, big old, bastard? 

JOHN OLIVER Ah. 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: "Last time you told her about one of my gigs, she just talked about it endlessly at work. She really bored her collie-gues."

JOHN OLIVER OK, yes, that's really good. 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: They climbed into their car, to go to the airport, to Australia. "Wow," said, Laurie. "I've had such a great day. It's only still lunchtime.". 

"Hang on," said Lou, suddenly. "We'd better do some publicity for this gig. Can I borrow 20 bucks for some posters for it?"

"Shar, pei me back next week," replied his wife. "Get me a boxer chocolates to say thanks. My purse is on the back seat.". 

"I'll just ridgeback and get it."

[CLIP ENDS]

HZ: How do you feel about the Chinese banning puns. 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: Where you ban puns, then then you will also ban people.

HZ: How?

ANDY ZALTZMAN: I'm not sure, but it sort of sounds right. I mean, frankly, a government that that bans puns is basically saying, "We don't know what we're doing." This is a desperation measure. It's a panic move against one of the great verbal freedoms known to mankind. And, you know, China is supposedly trying to improve its relations with the West, and yet this is an attack on the very heart of Britishness, really, to ban the pun. It's much easier to go for a wordplay than a genuine expression of emotion, I think, you know, that's a fundamental truth of Britishness, isn't it? One of the most touching wedding speeches I've ever seen, of course, was our own father at your wedding. Generally, the father of the bride speech is very emotional. You know, an explanation of what the daughter means to father, it's a true expression of one of the greatest forms of human love. But our father chose to go with 15 minutes of puns. 

HZ: Human love of wordplay.

ANDY ZALTZMAN: Which in many ways transcended that. Transcended even the concept of love, of parental love.

HZ: How best to describe dad's speech at my wedding? Uh, it was as if someone had turned up his pun setting, all the way to "annihilate". And yes, I laughed until I cried. We all did. And nearly four years later, friends still mention it to me all the time. But, none of us seem to be able to remember what he actually said. I vaguely recall a gag about a dowry of cattle, except it wasn't cattle, it was electric kettle, because dad's mild South African accent renders that vowel ambiguous. Kettle, "cettle".

Even though they're a constant presence in the Zaltzman household, almost like an extra awful sibling, dad's puns are ephemeral. I realise I can't actually remember any. But you've heard Andy's work. So just imagine where he got it from. This guy.

ZACK ZALTZMAN: I find that puns come to me rather than me going to them. It a case of being receptive. I see funny situations, and by swapping one of the key letters in the phrase for another one you create a sort of new identity. 

HZ: So opportunity is everywhere, if you're alive. 

ZACK ZALTZMAN: Oh yes, yes. Some days nothing happens, other days I get a few going, more or less together.

HZ: And has this been consistent throughout your life, or have there been periods where they've not...?

ZACK ZALTZMAN: I've always liked messing about with words. I don't make a special effort to be funny, I find funny things, funny situations. They're sort of quick one-liners you have, then you're gone, so even if it's a bad pun you still get a laugh.

HZ: And once you've created the pun, how long can you keep it going? 

ZACK ZALTZMAN: Not for very long. I move on to the next. 

HZ: He's lying. Some of his puns are bandied around for years. I think some of them were older than I am. Sometimes he claims they get better with age.

When did you first realise you have this gift?

ZACK ZALTZMAN: I wouldn't call it a gift. I think it's just an add-on. As a gift, I can't say that there's any sort of material or other benefits. 

HZ: There could have been benefits, if instead of becoming a sculptor dad had pursued a career as, say, a tabloid headline writer, or a cryptic crossword setter, or a composer of cracker jokes. 

ZACK ZALTZMAN: It helps days go by. 

HZ: Have you considered ever working in some different types of gags than puns? 

ZACK ZALTZMAN: No. No, puns are enough to go on with.

HZ: It's a lifetime's work? 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: I'm only as good as the last one. 

HZ: I don't think it's just my dad. I have a theory. I haven't properly, scientifically tested it, but, in my informal sample group, I've noticed punning grows stronger in men when they become fathers. We know that thousands of physical and psychological switches are thrown in mothers at birth. So in dads, maybe puns? Reckon there's anything to this? Anyway, even God the Father can't resist a pun, the Bible is riddled with them. Though they're probably only funny if you're fluent in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Ancient Greek. They get lost in translation. 

Are your children punning yet? 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: They've occasionally attempted a pun, or they'll just say something stupid and say, "Daddy, was that a pun?"

HZ: Double meaning is a hard thing to master when you're six and eight. 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: Yes, true. It's not like being a Olympic gymnast. You don’t have to be brilliant by the time you're six.

HZ: How is their gymnastics coming along? 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: Well, they're not going to be Olympic gymnasts.

HZ: So I guess it's a good thing they've got the pun gene to fall back on? I mean, they can try to resist it, but it's gonna get all of us in the end.

ZACK ZALTZMAN: I did think of one the other day that was quite good, but I let it go now, I can't remember it. 

HZ: Oh, no. Have you, do you write them down? 

ZACK ZALTZMAN: No, no, no, nothing as elaborate as that. 

HZ: To think of the ones the world will never hear. 

ZACK ZALTZMAN: Yes, [unclear]. 

HZ: Perhaps there is a fundamental element of the human makeup... 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: [Unclear]. 

HZ: ...oh Jesus, it just never ends... that cannot resist puns. Even if intellectually he would like to, physically he can't.

ANDY ZALTZMAN: Yes. Yeah, I mean, it's, well, there is a medical condition, I believe, called "Witzelsucht", which is the, you know, the unstoppable propensity to make puns.

HZ: Really? 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: Yes. 

HZ: Is there a cure? 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: No, I think it's saturation therapy. You have to make as many puns as possible.  

HZ: Yeah, well, let's see how that works out. 

[CLIP FROM THE BUGLE]

ANDY ZALTZMAN: "...so excited about this gig. If it goes well, I want to take this show to dogs all around the world."

"Well, let's just see how it goes first, love," cautioned his wife. "Don't start thinking about an e-laborador." Elaborate tour?

"Not yet. It's gonna be a logistical challenge anyway. I mean, for a start, they'll have to clean the auditorium, night after a crowd of dogs has poodle over it. And if any promoter asks you to do a gig for cats, I'd be hesitant. Alsatian that offer."

Suddenly, Lou slammed on the brakes. "Cripes! That Indian chef just spilt a load of melted butter on the road." 

JOHN OLIVER: Oh, yeah? What happened? 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: "That was a close cor, gi is the last thing I want to see." 

JOHN OLIVER: Argh! No!

ANDY ZALTZMAN: As they pulled into the airport, they drove past a textile maker who'd fallen into the icy Hudson River and just climbed out. "Look, darling," said Lou Reed, "It's a cold and wet weaver." Bet that was worth the wait. "Cold and wet weaver." 

[CLIP ENDS]

HZ: This episode of The Allusionist was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Andy Zaltzman, Zack Zaltzman, and Martin Austwick.

This show resides at theallusionist.org, and if you want to chat about words, find @allusionistshow on Facebook and Twitter. I'm also tweeting there as @HelenZaltzman. 

Your randomly-selected word from the dictionary today is…

Gralloch. Noun. The entrails of a dead deer. Verb. Disembowelled (a deer that has been shot).

Try using it in an email today.  

Episodes will be out every other week, and puns will be kept to a minimum. 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: If you're looking for a point in a pun, I think you'll probably listening to it wrong. 

HZ: Although I believe etymologically, "a pun" is from the Latin for "point". 

ANDY ZALTZMAN: Is it?

HZ: It has quite fuzzy origins.