Allusionist 8 Crosswords transcript

Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/crosswords.

This is The Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, search for meaning in a bowl of alphaghetti. Let's warm-up for today's show with a little word history. Today, we are talking about "junk". Not the rather vulgar slang for genitals, but in the sense of "rubbish". This arose from the 14th century meaning of "junk", which was the nautical term for "rope", and it evolved to mean "the crap left behind by ships", and from that to mean "any old crap at all". On with the show.

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HZ: "Tomb ends in one century, livid gloss puzzles. 7,10." That's your clue for what this episode is about. As I'm sure you deduced, cryptic crosswords, or, as I like to call them, "infuriating word puzzles that I can't do". On a good day, I can get maybe four clues. I think I'm thwarted pretty quickly by my ineptitude at divorcing a word from its meaning in that context, which, if you've been listening to The Allusionist since the beginning, you'll remember was one of the reasons I am averse to puns. So I'll blame my shoddy cryptic crossword ability on my suspicion that the clues are puns. 

JOHN FEETENBY: A pun does not always work when you write it down, because people have different ways of pronouncing different words. Clues can be analogous to a pun, but I think clues are more like jokes, and that's kind of what I keep falling back on. If you can tell jokes, and if you can understand jokes when other people tell them, I think you're probably most of the way there to being able to do cryptic crosswords. 

HZ: I am capable of identifying jokes. Perhaps there is hope for me with cryptic crosswords, then. 

JOHN FEETENBY: My name is John Feetenby and I compile crosswords for a living. I do the two cryptic crosswords, I do the big general knowledge crossword, and I do assorted other bits and bobs, for the newspaper that I work for. When I announce that I make crosswords, the first thing is, "Oh, I can't do those, oh, that would be impossible." The second response I get is, "Ah, you're the devious so-and-so who ruins my Sunday morning every week." Sorry.

HZ: Cryptic crosswords have been ruining Sunday mornings since the 30th of July, 1925, the publication date of what is considered to be the first true cryptic crossword, in the Sunday Express newspaper in Britain. Straightforward crosswords had been around for considerably longer, but the first official crossword appeared in December 1913, when Arthur Wynne, a former onion farmer who was, by then, the editor of The New York World newspaper, decided to fill some space on a page with what was then called a "word cross". That's how crosswords started. But how does John Feetenby start a crossword? 

JOHN FEETENBY: The way I do it is starting with the grid, and to keep things easy for their graphics department I work from a finite number of grids that I know I can fit words into fairly easily. 

HZ: How many grids? 

JOHN FEETENBY: With the cryptic ones, I've got 31 different ones. 

HZ: Oof. 

JOHN FEETENBY: So this is just to keep it varied. Whatever the day of the month is that the puzzle will be published on, I use the grid for that, pretty confident in the knowledge that I haven't used it recently. 

HZ: For the average British cryptic crossword, the grid is 12 to 15 squares square, and has a rotationally symmetrical word layout. 

Which more normally comes first, the word or the idea for the clue? 

JOHN FEETENBY: I don't see how you could do it other than starting with the word. I think that's the bedrock, that's what the solver will be working towards, so that's what you're working from. So, you know, you start with your grid full of words and no clues at all. I'm not sure how you could work doing it the other way round, you know, having a brilliant idea for word, you then have to find a place for it in the grid, which is unlikely to happen over and over. Whereas if you go the other way round, you know, you're starting with your words. I'm absolutely, totally egalitarian as far as words are concerned. I think you can write an interesting clue for any word, and any word will lend itself to an interesting definition. And then you just furrow your brow until brilliant cryptic clues fall out of your fingers. 

HZ: Yeah, those brilliant cryptic clues that, to the uninitiated, look like lines that David Lynch cut from a script for being too confusing. Show me the way, John. 

JOHN FEETENBY: I don't think there is a rigid set of rules where you can say, well, this is fair and that's not fair and this is what you're doing, this is what you don't do, because as long as the person who is solving the crossword has got the word from the clue you have given them, then that's an alright clue. When you first look at it, it should look like a sentence that reads off the page. But you know, out of that sentence, there is going to be a word, and you know how many letters long it is, and that helps. And then you just have to start breaking the clue down and seeing what kind of thing it's trying to tell you, because if you can't get it, it's pointless. It has to be apprehendable at some level. 

Squashing words into grids, it's sort of a little bit routine. As you do it, you're kind of looking at the words going in and thinking, "Well, there's something I might do with that, and that's something I might do with that." There are things I fall back on, and I think I'll have shortcuts that I use. The letter "S" can be "second", or "son", or something like that. "T" can be "time". My route one is anagrams. You know, if I get stuck on compiling a cryptic clue then I start poking around with the letters and see if they anagrammatise into something appealing. 

And it's not particularly elegant, but there was a crossword I was compiling not long ago and I had the phrase "in loco parentis", and I said, "Wow, man, had you start clueing that?" And I had this train fixation going on, I wanted to do something about trains, because it's got "loco" in the middle, and it didn't work, it didn't work, and it was the last one, and I clued everything else, and I was just like, "It's going to have to be an anagram." But it turns out "in loco parentis" is an anagram of "oral inspection", and it just, to me, it doesn't look like it should be. Lovely, you know, "Oral inspection, ordered for one acting as mum or dad."

"Oral inspection", that's all the letters you need, "ordered" is the indication that you're going to have to jumble those up somehow, and then there's the definition tacked on the end, and that's a really kind of bread-and-butter clue. But you need stuff like that, there has to be a little toehold so that you can get started. 

HZ: Here's the typical formula of a cryptic crossword clue. At the beginning or the end of the clue is the meaning of the answer you're looking for, while the rest of the clue indicates how you're supposed to get there. It might contain a code word to hint to the solver what is going on. For example, "endless" or "beheaded" to mean you have to remove a letter from the end of the word, or "confused", "wild", or "drunk" to show you're looking for an anagram. As well as taking liberties with our normal vocabulary, crossword clues have a vocabulary of their own. 

JOHN FEETENBY: That's not set in stone. That's a thing that will change with time, you know, as language kind of moves on, and I persistently use the word "em", and the word "en", to mean "space". And people kind of understand that, but I don't know if they understand why they know it. I guess it's archaic in these days of not having hot metal presses. They're printers' measures for spaces. So an "en" was a single-character space, and an "em" was a double-character space. Now, I just use that quite blithely. Nobody ever rings up or emails to say, "What on earth do you mean by that?" But I don't know quite that that's a standard formation that's going to last that much longer. 

HZ: If you don't speak fluent crossword and know every possible meaning of every word ever, there are manuals and dictionaries and websites that will help you decode what's going on in the clues. John, any other advice for the crossword novice? 

JOHN FEETENBY: Any advice I have to give would not be much more complicated than keep going, keep trying. Have a look at the short words and see if anything leaps out. Getting the first clue in gives you an awful lot of ingress into the remaining clues. It gets easier as you carry on through it because you get more and more letters, but you never reach that point of triviality that you do with sudokus. They're really interesting when you start them, but as you go through the puzzle, it becomes progressively less and less challenging, to the point at which the last square can only be one thing, and you don't get that in crosswords. 

You can be stuck on the last crossword clue for quite a long time. With the cryptic crosswords I do, one of them is two sets of clues for the same grid, so for the same answers there's a set of cryptic clues and a set of straightforward clues, and that's a great way of learning, because, if you cannot do the cryptic clue, have a look at the quick clue. Might give you an idea what the word is, and then sort of try and reverse-engineer the clue to see how it came out. 

HZ: So you've got like a cheat right there, but it's legitimate. 

JOHN FEETENBY: Right in front of you. I have one rather brilliant reader who got a little bit shirty about the fact that the straightforward clues were too visible. He said they would put him off because he tries to do it just using the cryptic clues, but he could sort of see the straightforward clues out the corner of his eye, so he has to mask them off with masking tape before he even starts. 

HZ: That's a brilliantly low-tech solution to a problem. But technology is intruding on the crossword. 

JOHN FEETENBY: Say 10 or 15 years ago, that general knowledge crossword, I would have to make that a lot more accessible than it is now. Whatever I write, people can google it, and they do. And there are crossword forums where people trade answers and comments and stuff. So at that point, how do you make a general knowledge crossword interesting? The only way to make interesting is by putting interesting things into it, so that's where I come from with that at the moment. The general knowledge crossword that I do every week has a prize attached to it, quite a big prize, so I do make the crossword quite challenging, but it is all ultimately googleable. 

HZ: That's a hollow victory, though. Technology is changing crosswords in all sorts of ways with the setters. 

JOHN FEETENBY: I've been dabbling in compiling crosswords and getting them published and stuff since the 1980s. When I started, my first job was for a trade journal called Computer Talk, which doesn't exist anymore. You'd think, well, OK, Computer Talk, that sounds like a very high-tech thing, but the way I was making a crossword for them was by drawing a grid on a piece of paper with a ruler and a pencil and then filling the words in manually, because there weren't, at that point, such things as easily-accessible databases of words or computer algorithms to squeeze them into grids. You kind of did it by trial and error, and one brilliant book, the Crossword Dictionary I think, and it had no definitions, but it had all the words from that dictionary listed by length of word, and then alphabetically by alternate letters. So you start, the first half of the book started with four-letter words that were "A"-something, "A"-something, and then "A"-something, "B"- something, until you got to the 26-letter words that were "Z"-something, "Z"-something, "Z"-something, which there aren't terribly many of. And then the second half of the book was exactly the same, but rearranged by the even-numbered letters rather than the odd-numbered ones. So you know, it used to be like a proper physical task, and now the process of actually filling a grid is pretty straightforward. 

As a result of that, you now have, I suspect, companies who have large databases of grids, large databases of words, large databases of clues, and it is pretty much just pressing F1 on a keyboard and there's your crossword. I mean, know I'm just like some little guy with a loom sitting next to a clothes factory, sort of hand-stitching mine together and going, "Well, I hope mine have like a degree of idiosyncrasy, or they can be lighter on their feet maybe than the huge industrially-produced ones," but that doesn't alter the fact that it is quite easy just to buy things off the peg now. 

HZ: Perhaps to prove that you can't replace him with a machine just yet, John then set himself a challenge. 

JOHN FEETENBY: I very, very foolishly said something like, "Oh yeah, I know how you can write a clue for any word, it's a doddle." 

HZ: The self-inflicted test to write a cryptic clue for my surname, "Zaltzman". 

JOHN FEETENBY: I haven't entirely finessed it yet, but I could see where I was going with it, right? Spent ages with those "Z"s. "Jacuzzi", I was once in the position of having to write cryptically for "jacuzzi" and just about kind of scrapped the grid and started again. "Z" is a difficult one, and this is where bespoke crossword-compiling will will stand you in good stead, because you can move with the times. I am aware of a band called ZZ Top, and I am confident enough that ZZ Top are part of the cultural subconscious, that I could use them in a clue. So I reckon you could use the phrase "top band" to indicate "Z-Z", right? 

HZ: Yes. 

JOHN FEETENBY: So then you've just got an "A-L-T" in the middle of it, and "A-L-T" is brilliant because there's all sorts of things you can use as synonyms for that. It could be "a lieutenant", which is not very useful here, but it is short for "alternate" and "alternative". So, you've got your "Z-Z"s taken care of, you've got your "A-L-T" taken care of, and then "M-A-N" is just a doddle. I mean, it's not the most brilliant clue I've ever written, but I thought: "Top band, including alternative chap, a podcaster."

HZ: Incredible. This is like the proudest moment of my professional life. 

JOHN FEETENBY: That's made my heart lift. That's brilliant. I very rarely sort of sit back from the screen and go, "Crikey, that was good," but I did once. It's: "100, minus one, equals 99."

HZ: Oh no. 

JOHN FEETENBY: And it's four letters. 

HZ: Cone? 

JOHN FEETENBY: Brilliant!

HZ: You've encouraged me. 

JOHN FEETENBY: Do you see where it comes from? The "C" is Roman numerals for a hundred. 

HZ: I didn't even think of that. I'm a fool. 

JOHN FEETENBY: And then "one" is just "O-N-E" written out, and then a "99" is a cone, an ice cream. 

HZ: It was because it was four letters, that made it easier than if it was gonna be longer. 

JOHN FEETENBY: Yeah, as I earnestly beseech people starting crosswords, to begin with use the small words, the little ones. 

HZ: That is the quickest I've ever got a clue. It's a miracle. 

Your randomly-selected word from the dictionary today is…

Waterbrash. Noun. A sudden flow of saliva associated with indigestion.

One of you asked if I could spell out the randomly-selected words of the day. Even better, there is a picture of the relevant dictionary entry on the post about each episode at theallusionist.org, as well as links to various interesting bits and bobs about the subject of the episode, and a bunch of other stuff. Take a look.

This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick. John Feetenby's crosswords appear every Sunday in one of Britain's biggest newspapers. And, one final clue: "The den is in disarray, becoming terminal. 3,3." The end.

Allusionist 7 Mountweazel transcript

Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/mountweazel.

This is The Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, pan for linguistic gold. Coming up in today's show are revelations that will shatter the belief you had in the one thing you thought you could trust in this chaotic world.

To warm-up, here's some word history. "Poodle", jaunty word for a jaunty kind of dog, and, because poodles are water dogs, their name came from the German word "pudel", meaning "splash". It shares a root with "puddle". Bonus dog etymology, "basset hounds" and the word "bass" shared the same linguistic root, which is the Latin "bassus", meaning "low". Because a basset hound is low, right? To the ground, not morally. 

On with the show, and…

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HZ: …a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from listener Eley Williams which basically said, "Hey, Helen, you know all those dictionaries you love and revere so much? Well, they're riddled with lies." Admittedly, she put it in much more polite terms, but she did say she's finishing a doctorate covering fake words that are deliberately listed in dictionaries. Shocked and intrigued, I had to find out more from Eley. Just as soon as I'd regained consciousness and got up off the floor. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: I mean, I'm exactly the same. You kind of approach a dictionary, not even tentatively, it is, if it's in the dictionary, it is true, and that truth is pretty much immobile in between editions. Dictionaries kind of take on this weird, almost priest-like role on the bookshelf, and then they're sort of preserved. You kind of want it to be immutable, really, otherwise what's the point? But the idea of a word actually being looked up and either it being false, the definition, or if the word itself not to exist in reality at all, is what got me into this, this kind of... The idea of the deceit behind it. And also the idea, therefore, of a lexicographer lying.

HZ: Do you think it was very hard for them to lie, given that usually they have to concentrate on presenting the truth in as objective a way as possible?

ELEY WILLIAMS: Yeah, well, that's objectivity, but, I mean, it's the most kind of interesting and enjoyable, looking at these false words. What I really enjoy about the false words is that often you don't know who it was that made this up. You don't know what was the purpose for its creation. 

HZ: These hoax terms are now known as "mountweazels", after probably the most famous hoax term, "Lillian Virginia Mountweazel", a made-up person who appeared in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: On the same page as Mount Rushmore and Mussorgsky, so, you know, in good company. The entry is: "Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia, 1942-73..."

HZ: Oh, so a short life. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: Wait for it, a tragic short life, peppered with intrigue. "An American photographer born in Bangs, Ohio..." - bit of foreshadowing, there. "Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris, and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad, and published as "Flags Up!" in 1972. Mounweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.". 

Shed a tear, but someone here has had such fun, first of all, just making nonsense up, really, but the idea of something being published called "Flags Up!", as in flagging something up, the idea of this person working for "Combustibles magazine" and dying in an explosion, having been born in "Bangs, Ohio", I mean... Someone has put idle thought, but thought, into creating this little falsehood. This kind of interesting character, but, crucially, someone who's not too interesting. They couldn't be flicking through the dictionary in order to find Mountweazel, because she doesn't exist, nor do you really want it to necessarily be too obvious that it's fake, because often these words are included in dictionaries as copyright traps. 

HZ: Ah. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: So, say you, Helen Zaltzman, you are writing a dictionary and I'm writing a dictionary. It would be quite easy for me just to look at what you've come up with, and with a little bit of twiddling and finessing of some definitions, mine would be very similar to yours. If, however, you'd inserted a false entry into your dictionary and you saw that it occurred in mine, you'd be, it'd be quite clear that I've just made off of your copy. So sections contain these false words as little snares, almost, to catch potential piracy out. 

HZ: But some people were determined to catch the traps before the traps caught them. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: In 2005, in the New Oxford American Dictionary, an investigator asked whether they were any of these mountweazels, and the response came back there was one and it was in the "E" section. So the investigator then whittled down a list of five potential candidates, of which words he thought or she thought might be the potential false word. The first one was "earth loop". That's two words, which is a noun, "electrical British term for a ground loop". 

HZ: Plausible. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: Plausible. You think so? OK. The second one is "EGD". They're initials, which is "a technology or system that integrates a computer display with a pair of eyeglasses". An abbreviation of "eyeglass display".

HZ: And now there's Google Glass. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: So the future is here. 

HZ: Yeah. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: There's then "electrofish", which is a verb, "ELSF", "esquivalience", and "euro creep" is the final one. And this is the kind of shortlist of potential falsehoods, and this is sent off to a number of lexicographers and editors and linguistic experts in order to kind of sound out, or flush out, which was the fake word that was there, and most of them agreed on which one was fake. And it turns out that it was "esquivalience", and the definition for that word, noun, is, "The wilful avoidance of one's official responsibilities, late 19th century, perhaps from the French 'esquive'..." - my French is not great - "...to dodge or slink away". And again, that's fitting, right? So the idea of dodging your responsibilities as a lexicographer by planting this fake word. But this was very much a word set there as a copyright trap.

It's interesting, because you can track, given that's 2005 and the content of so many dictionaries is now online, you can track quite easily whether it has then been copied without understanding that it's fake. So it turned up on dictionary.com as if it was a real word, and it's just, yeah, it's interesting to see how fake words or false words or fictitious entries do disseminate so quickly, when you haven't got a kind of editorial probity, or you don't necessarily research too well, by the fact of the word and its etymology, etc., it's come from.

HZ: Indeed, etymology, or rather lack of etymology, can be a dead giveaway. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: This appeared in a wartime edition of Webster's New 20th Century Dictionary, and it's an entry for a bird, it's "jungftak", a noun, "A Persian bird, the male of which had only one wing on the right side, and the female only one wing on the left side. Instead of the missing wings, the male had a hook of bones and the female an eyelet of bones, and it was by uniting hook and eye that they were enabled to fly. Each one alone had to remain on the ground." 

HZ: So romantic. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: So lovely. Isn't it great? 

HZ: It's like those broken heart necklaces. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: Yes. As with the mountweazel, it shows this almost concern for narrative, with the entry, and how it's been framed, and how the characters are operating within it, as if it was a little short story or almost poetic conceit. It falls down so much as an entry because, as far as I've been able to tell, there's no etymological validity to "jungftak" as being Persian. It obviously is ridiculous. It puts me in mind of those cryptozoological pictures actually, where they kind of sew bits of 18 different animals together and then claim it's some underwater alien creature. So it's got the head of a walrus figure, and the feet of a penguin, and all the rest of it, and it just doesn't make any sense, and it looks so strange, but if you're looking to fool the right person it'll pass scrutiny. So yeah, it's a kind of tender portrait of something that really doesn't exist, that has no place in the dictionary, and almost seems kind of at odds to what the dictionary stand for, but so lovely just to be there. 

HZ: So how many copyright traps are there in the average dictionary? 

ELEY WILLIAMS: Well, lexicography, the world of lexicography, that dark shady underworld, tends to be quite quiet about them, obviously, because otherwise it would then undermine them even being there. So, I mean, the most famous one is probably "mountweazel". There's a cyclopaedia, the Appleton's Cyclopaedia of 1888-1889, and that had over 200 false entries, it's estimated, which makes you wonder why not just list it as a work of fiction? But they're very subtly incorrect, but intended to be incorrect, and it's posited that that's because the contributors were paid per word. So after a while they just thought, "Well, if it's a dollar a word, I can just make up another word and shove it in there." 

HZ: Dictionaries have always been fallible. Not just because of human greed, but also egos, filing blunders, and household pests. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: First draft of the Oxford English Dictionary, when it was first published, when they were moving around all the different slips of paper that were going to go into the final proofs, the entry for "bondmaid" just fell down the back of a cabinet and so wasn't included. Just there were errors like that. And some proofs were found made into a nest for rats, and there was some debate about whether Murray, who was the first editor of the OED, whether they should include an entry on "appendicitis", because at the time it wasn't seen as a necessarily relevant word, and it was a bit too specific, and not necessarily useful as a word for the dictionary at that time. So it didn't go in. But then in following years, but quite soon after, one of the royal family had appendicitis, and it was appearing in all these newspaper cuttings, but it wasn't in the dictionary. So you did feel a bit like kicking yourself, they just got the timing wrong there. 

HZ: For lexicographers to consider including a word in a dictionary, there must be several examples of that word appearing in writing. Therefore, presumably, if a hoax word is discovered and then written about enough, it could end up back in the dictionary as a legitimate entry. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: So I think "esquivalience" and "mountweazel", they have entered the lexicon, really, to mean "a fictitious entry". They were both quick to almost weed them out, I think, because once the hoax is exposed, it loses its destiny as a trap. Once you've discovered one, you kind of... Do you want to declare that you found it? Because it's declaring something obsolete. It's kind of taking away from the joy of the reading of it. You know, people get very personally attached to particular editions, and I think if one edition seems to be somehow flawed... But is it a flaw? I guess I find it... Not charming, because it is so unscrupulous, but it brings a real character to a dictionary, if you know that it's got these little nudges and winks that are there for the right reader. A reader with too much time on their hands. 

HZ: It shows you the human behind the exercise. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: Exactly. Exactly. And I do, that really is just the wonderful thing about lexicography, these little human details. 

HZ: Stay vigilant for human mischief in all sorts of different works of reference. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: I'm sure you've heard of "trap streets'' on maps, which are those false cartographical streets and rivers, tributaries, and anything on a map basically that's included there for the same reason as these fake words, to act as a copyright trap, so if it's replicated on a different map, they'll know that it's been copied. Which does mean you get some poor hikers trying to find a road that's very clearly marked on a map that doesn't actually exist. Grove's Dictionary is a musical tome, I think that's the title, has a couple of good ones. Full of composers and the rest of it. 

HZ: It's everywhere. Can't even trust Grove's. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: Mountweazels popping up, it's like whack-a-mole. 

HZ: I think what we've learned is you cannot trust anything. 

ELEY WILLIAMS: Trust nothing, trust no one. 

HZ: This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Many thanks to Eley Williams for bringing mountweazels to my attention, even though it has been emotionally and intellectually devastating. You'll find me on Twitter and Facebook at @AllusionistShow. There are links to Eley's website at theallusionist.org/mountweazel, where you can also see a beautiful illustration by Eley's sister Catherine of the fake bird, the "junkftak". 

Your randomly-selected word from the dictionary today is…

Osculum. Noun. A large aperture in a sponge through which water is expelled.

Or is it, dictionary? I don't know what to believe any more.

Allusionist 6 The Writing on the Wall transcript

Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/museums.

HZ: This is The Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, release the linguistic hounds. Coming up in today's show.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: If you think you're being followed, you quite possibly are.

HZ: To warm-up, here's some word history. The thesaurus sounds like it got its name from a synonyms-loving dinosaur, but it comes from the ancient Greek word "thēsaurus", meaning "storehouse", or "treasure". From the 1590s, there were "thesauriae", early dictionaries that were treasure troves of words, but it was celebrity thesaurus-compiler Peter Mark Roget who first used "thesaurus" as the term for a collection of words grouped together by meaning. And since it was first published in 1852, Roget's Thesaurus has never been out of print. And, in case you're wondering whether there are any synonyms for "thesaurus" in the thesaurus, yes, there are. Including a new word to me: "Onomasticon". What does that mean? It means the same as thesaurus, keep up. On with the show.

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HZ: What are your top five reasons for visiting a museum? New gift shop. Café. Fantasy shop for artefacts I'd take home if I could get away with it. Oh, and edify myself by studying important, beautiful, or educational objects. But what's probably not on most people's list is reading the written caption description thingies accompanying those objects. Come to think of it, I don't even know the proper name for the written caption description thingies. 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: They're called text panels. 

HZ: Thanks.

RACHEL SOUHAMI: But there's a variety of text panels, so there might be introductory text panels, there may be sectional text panels, there may be object labels. 

HZ: Rachel Souhami is an exhibition maker, curating and designing exhibitions. 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: They're the last thing that you will write or do for an exhibition. An exhibition will take somewhere between two and five years to create. Usually you're at the end of something that's been a very long process. 

HZ: You're just wanting to get rid of it...

RACHEL SOUHAMI: You've got to get rid of it, get rid of it now. 

HZ: But you can't because there's still a lot of work to do. 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: So you have to think about how it is you want to distribute text throughout the exhibition. Let's say you've got an exhibition that's over multiple rooms. For each room, do you want to have a panel that introduces that room? And then, if the objects in that room are sort of divided into different related sections, do you want to have a panel for each section? And then do you have a label for each case of objects, or each individual object? So you have to develop something that is called a text hierarchy. And then from there, we don't want to inundate people with text. That makes it a book, rather than an exhibition, and we know that people don't really read that much text in exhibitions. 

HZ: Oh, they don't? 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: No, they don't. 

HZ: Oh, so all this is for nothing? 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: The visitor tracking studies, where... This has been going on since about the 1950s, at least, you sort of watch visitors move through exhibitions and look at what it is that they... Where they go and what they look at and how long they spend in a place. 

HZ: We're being spied on?

RACHEL SOUHAMI: You're being, yes, yes. 

HZ: Oh great. 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: If you're being, if you think you're being followed, you quite possibly are. 

HZ: What kind of proportion of people are actually bothering to read? 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: About 30 percent. 

HZ: Oh. 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: So, you know, it's a bit sad, really.

HZ: Seems like a lot of effort for 30 percent uptake, so why bother? 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: Oh, it's a way of directing a reading. It's a way of saying, "This is what this room is about, this is what this subject is about, this is what you should be thinking about this." Perhaps all of us, museums and the rest of society, have an idea of museums being kind of places of authorised established knowledge, and that if you go to those, you'll see, you know, the official version of "science" or "natural history" or "art history" or whatever. But of course, that isn't the case. They are a version. 

And the interesting thing about exhibitions is they're authored. You know, they're put together, they're constructed, like a TV documentary. But we're often not aware of that. It's not made explicit. The credits are, you know, buried away at the end somewhere. You might not necessarily know who's put it together. And so what you're seeing really is one person or group of people's view on this subject. But visitors will come with their own views, and their own interpretations, their own sort of background knowledge. So it's striking a balance. You don't really want to be wishy-washy, but at same time you don't want to say, "This is what you should think about this," because people might want to disagree with you. So I guess there's the question of how much do you want to feed someone a line on either a subject for the exhibition as a whole, or a particular painting, and say, "This is what this is about." It should really be, "This is what we think about this." 

HZ: OK, so there's the museum's editorial standpoint, plus the mitigating factor of what the visitors might think, plus the essential facts about the exhibit itself. That's a lot to fit on a little text panel. How do you even go about it? 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: You have to be a journalist. So it's the same kind of principles as writing a news article in a way. So short sentences. Don't be too verbose. Don't be too technical. Try to explain the words immediately, but also don't patronise your audience. Try and get the essence of what this panel is about in the first sort of couple of sentences. How it is that you frame an exhibition, and the whole language in which an exhibition is framed and the subject is talked about, actually starts well before you even come to write the text. It starts well before you actually start to write the concept for the exhibition. It comes down to things like... What's the museum? So if you're going to have an exhibition of photography and you're a modern art museum, you might talk about it in a different way than if you're a design or a historical museum. Why are we doing this now? What's the imperative? Who are our sponsors? 

HZ: Does that influence the information much?  

RACHEL SOUHAMI: Well, if you think about, you want to get some money for something, you know, this gallery needs updating, we don't have enough money, where are we going to go for this? How are we going to pitch this in terms of the buzzwords that will get us some money from sponsors? They might be commercial sponsors, they might be public funders, but there's still a kind of way in which one needs to present the project in order to get money, and that will then frame, you know, what it is you're going to do and how it is you're going to talk about it. 

HZ: Are there many compromises involved in that kind of situation? 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: There can be, and I suppose it depends on how or where you are that this is what you're doing. Because there's a kind of a zeitgeist of how one thinks about subjects, or museums, or exhibitions. What's the purpose? Why do we do this? 

HZ: Is it inevitable that an exhibition is going to be a reflection of the time of the exhibition, rather than the objects in the exhibition? 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: Yes, yes, absolutely. And actually, this is something to think about when you're writing text as well. If it's a permanent collection, that might be up for 10 years, 20 years, so you have to think carefully about the language that you're using. It can't be too contemporary, because it's going to go out of date very quickly, so... And that's another challenge, what happens if you create this exhibition, you know, based on what it is that you know now, or what it is you think now, and then five years down the line new evidence or new information comes to light that goes, "Oh, well, hold on a minute, it's not quite like that," you know, what do you do and how quickly can you change it? And is that just a matter of changing a text label, or do you have to redo the whole exhibition? 

HZ: Sometimes there are additional linguistic challenges that are rather unexpected. 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: I was working for a well-known science organisation who were putting on an exhibition about genetically-modified foods, and they wanted me to write some text panels about what genetic modification is. But their way of thinking about their audience was that they had a, quote, "scientific literacy", unquote, of a 10-year-old, which means that we need to leave out some terms, like "chromosome" and "gene". 

HZ: Difficult to write about genetic modification without using the word "gene". 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: It took me two days to write 70 words of text. 

HZ: Are there any synonyms for "gene" that are less complicated than "gene"? 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: No. So I can't remember quite what I did, but it was convoluted. Would have been much easier to be able to say "gene". And I kind of understand the fear about not wanting to use technical language, but it's very easy to introduce a term and then immediately define it in a sort of completely non-patronising way. Your audience aren't stupid. 

HZ: They're in a museum. 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: They are in a museum. 

HZ: Here's the predicament. Too little text, and visitors might not have all the information they need. Too much, and they might spend too much time reading, and not enough actually looking at the exhibits. Is there an optimal amount of text? 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: I mean, it really does vary. So, places... Tate Britain, for example, has minimal text in its new hang, whereas other places have, you know, huge amounts of text. I went to an exhibition. It was a living history exhibition, supposedly, and it was 16 panels of text and four replica objects. 

HZ: Seems a bit disproportionate. 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: It was a bit disproportionate. I thought it was a shame, because it's not really an... It's not my idea of an exhibition, it's just a lot of text, and actually it's quite exhausting to read. We already know that only 30 percent of people read all that text anyway, and it's a bit dull. You need something, you want something to interact with in some way.

HZ: Well, there needs to be a reason for being there, rather than just reading it in a book or on a website. 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: Yeah, exactly. 

HZ: Do people ever sabotage the text panels, as far as, you know? Write amusing things on them? 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: Not as far as I know, although I do know exhibitions where people have made guerrilla exhibits. They've put an exhibit in with its own little label. It's called "institutional critique", which is where people will make interventions in an existing exhibition, sort of point out deficiencies in the previous exhibitions, or new ways of thinking about that collection. New histories.  

Fred Wilson's a really good example of that. Fred Wilson is an artist, and his most famous example was an exhibition called "Minding the Museum" at the Maryland Historical Society in the States. And this was a sort of old colonial house with sort of very nice, fancy silverware, from sort of the colonial masters. They invited him in to make some interventions, and he went through their collections and found manacles that were used for slaves, and put those in with the fancy silverwork, and called the case "metalwork". So what you get is this juxtaposition of fancy silver stuff and manacles. It's all metalwork, it's all from the same era, it's all from the museum's collections. The manacles previously weren't on display. But it immediately makes a commentary about not only the museum, but that period of history as well. The label for that was just that one word, "metalwork". 

HZ: So with just nine letters, the meaning of an exhibit can be transformed. And in fact, the presence of the words in museums, whether you read them or not, makes a critical difference. In 1925, the archaeologist Leonard Woolley was excavating a palace complex in the ancient Mesopotamian city-state of Ur. The palace would have been pretty new when Ur was abandoned around 500 B.C., so Woolley and his team were surprised and perplexed when they uncovered a roomful of objects that were hundreds of years older than that... Until they discovered a number of clay cylinders covered in writing in three languages, which turned out to be written explanations of the artefacts they accompanied. Woolley realised they'd unearthed a museum. In fact, the earliest known example of museums as we define them today. 

Thanks to the texts, they understood that the room contained a curated collection of objects designed to preserve, commemorate, and interpret the past for viewers in the present. Without the text, it was just a bunch of old stuff. So ignore the text panels at your peril. Although sometimes the exhibitions seem to want to discourage you from reading them. 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: I once saw an exhibition that had its text panels at floor level, but it's sort of problematic, because you really have to get down on the floor to see them, so it's not very good if you're sort of very tall, or slightly arthritic, or... 

HZ: Was it an exhibition for snakes and babies? 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: No, it was an art exhibition. It was all sort of hung on the wall. It was really weird. But again, I think it's that thing about, we want the works to stand on their own. You know, you have to see the works and then not be distracted by the text. 

HZ: But then, just don't have it. 

RACHEL SOUHAMI: Yeah, but then people complain because there's no text. So it's that odd thing of people don't read the text, but they kind of want it there. 

HZ: As well as putting on exhibitions, Rachel Souhami produces the Museums Showoff live show. Visit museumsshowoff.org for dates of the next gigs.

This show's online home is theallusionist.org, where I've been posting some of your very interesting correspondence about previous episodes. Click the "Extra Allusionism" tab to read it. And seek out @AllusionistShow on Facebook and Twitter. I was pretty excited to hear from one of you who is a linguistics professor, at a very esteemed university, who gave one of his classes the assignment of listening to the c-bomb episode of this show, which is both very flattering and very worrying.  

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

Caprine. Adjective. Related to or resembling a goat or goats.

Try using it in an email today.

This episode of The Allusionist was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, and there'll be another in a fortnight.

Allusionist 5 Latin Lives! transcript

Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/latin.

This is The Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, poke language with a stick to see if it's still moving. 

To warm-up, here's some word history. Today, we're taking a look at "panic", a word we've had in English for about 400 years, having nabbed it from the French, but it came from the Ancient Greek "panikon", meaning "pertaining to the deity Pan", the half-man, half-goat god of fields, woods, and theatrical criticism. Like a lot of Greek gods, Pan seems to have been a real jerk. He was awful to women, he was responsible for the panpipes, and he was fond of playing pranks, such as making loud noises to scare herds of cattle and even armies. So Pan became known as the source of mysterious sounds that caused people and animals inexplicable but contagious fear, i.e. panic. On with the show.

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HZ: Every week since September 1989, a radio station in Finland has broadcast a news bulletin in Latin. 

CLIP FROM LATIN NEWS: No deal Athenee Radio for an F indicate an Italian course colleague in Atlanta narrowed it down. Hey, a bit. Charamba It's adult women in the D.A. Medical Hrishi Kinky Peski the title Ukrainian Rouzier Datamonitor Franco Galili Air. 

HZ: Nuntii Latini - that's Latin for "news in Latin" - goes up every Friday evening just before the main news, and it is the world's only news bulletin in Classical Latin. And it's now the Finnish Broadcasting Company's longest-running show. What began kind of as an experiment caught on around the world, and remains very popular amongst Latin enthusiasts, particularly students and priests. Each week, Nuntii Latini does cover the latest developments in the Latin language and archaeology. However, the primary focus, like a regular news bulletin, is Finnish and international news stories. So how do you talk about current affairs in a language that was last really current a couple of thousand years ago?

ANTTI IJÄS: My name is Antti Ijäs. I prepare the weekly vocabularies for the broadcast. 

HZ: To do that, Antti can't just rifle through the Latin dictionary. He has to come up with Latin words for concepts the Romans didn't have, from "electric cars" - "autocinetica electrica"- to "cash machines" - "apparatus pecuniarus automaticus" - and "macho man" - you know, like the Village People song "Ostinato Anime Masculi".  

ANTTI IJÄS: In this respect, contrary to popular belief, Latin is not that different from modern languages, for example. Obviously before computers we didn't have, in Finnish, any words for computers, but we just made some up. It's the same thing for Latin. A "computer", in English, is actually more or less based on Latin. The verb "computo" means "to calculate", so "computer" becomes "computatrum", an instrument of calculating.

And while the same thing goes for "internet", the first part of the word, "inter", is actually a Latin prefix, so "internet" becomes "interrēte", which is basically just a literal translation. Obviously, you can't really make up words that the listeners wouldn't understand, so it's not coining words out of scratch. And very often, especially in the case of international words for modern concepts, they often are derived from Latin and Greek, so there is a multitude of words which are readily usable. Just like a "nuclear missile", it becomes "missile nuclēares", because both elements are fundamentally Latin. 

HZ: Do you have arguments over the correct pronunciation of some of the words, how the Romans would have pronounced them, or do you figure, "No one can prove it," so you can just decide? 

ANTTI IJÄS: Yeah. Well, it's not that simple, obviously. As far as grammar is concerned, Nuntii Latini follows the so-called classical model, and also when it comes to pronunciation. But, with pronunciation, there are two different things that need to be taken into account. First is what historical linguistics can sort of figure out about how the Romans actually pronounced the language, and for this we have a lot of material. We have grammatical treatises that the Romans wrote themselves, we have commentaries by Cicero on how Latin was pronounced in his day, and we have spelling errors in inscriptions, et cetera, et cetera. So we have a lot of information, based on which we can reconstruct the original pronunciation. But then, of course, there is the tradition of pronouncing Latin. So, because Latin has been used continuously, every nation has developed some of their own idiosyncrasies in pronouncing Latin. But it's a very, very intriguing and mentally-challenging exercise altogether. 

HZ: At least Latin is so regular, it's a bit like a machine. 

ANTTI IJÄS: Yeah, but the thing with Latin actually is that it's another of these illusions that you get, because the tradition of grammar, or writing grammar, is actually based on teaching Latin grammar. So obviously, because all the terminology has been developed for Latin, or actually, well, borrowed from Greek, then it will make it seem like Latin is so logical because all the terms, they fit exactly, and all the categories, and so on, they have their exact matches and so on. But this is actually just because writing grammar was originally just an endeavour of Latin teachers. And if you look at English grammar, for example, or Finnish, older Finnish grammar, they are really confusing because they are trying to impose this Latin system on these vernaculars. 

HZ: Fair enough. I don't imagine the classrooms of the Roman Empire were full of children being drilled on amo, amas, amat...

MULTIPLE HELEN ZALTZMANS, RECITING AS A CHORUS: ...amamis, amatis, amant. Amabam, amabas, amabat. Amabamus, amabatis, amabant. Amabo, amabis, amabit. Amabimus, amabitis, amabunt. 

HZ: Fellow former Latin students, there will always be part of your brain that sounds like that, right? But even if its grammatical structure has been reverse-engineered, Latin is quite reliable compared to, say, Ancient Greek, or Old English, with far fewer irregularities of pronunciation and spelling. Certainly compared to modern English. Just take a look at words like "cough" and "through". The last four letters are the same written down, but neither the verbs nor the consonants sound the same. You wouldn't get that kind of mess in Latin. 

Perhaps I'm coming round to the idea of Latin making a comeback. Maybe Latin could actually be the solution people have been looking for when they attempt to establish a universal language. Generous estimates suggest there are only around a couple of million Esperanto speakers in the world. A lot more people than that already know a smattering of Latin, or a Latin-derived language. In fact, I wonder whether Nuntii Latini exists because more people around the world are familiar with Latin than Finnish. 

ANTTI IJÄS: Well, in a way, that could be the reason for the existence of the programme as such, because obviously we do have news in Finnish, but I don't think many people abroad would be interested in listening to them. 

HZ: Or it'd just be difficult, because Finnish looks like a hard language to master. 

ANTTI IJÄS: Ah, yeah, I would say, I mean, that's just an illusion because people don't hear Finnish that much, but most people would say that Latin is pretty hard as well. But of course, Latin occupies a very different place within the European history, because, as the editors often say, Latin is in a way the mother tongue of Europe. And in, up to, or I would say, well, 18th century, it occupied, especially in university, in the academia, it occupied a place very similar to what English has today. 

HZ: And in the present day, there are numerous schemes to keep Latin alive. Along with Nuntii Latini, there are Latin translations of books like Harry Potter and Winnie the Pooh. You can sign up for a free monthly Latin puzzle book, "Hebdomada Aenigmatum". The Pope tweets in Latin. You can choose Latin as your language option on Google and Facebook. There's a Latin version of Wikipedia, with 113,450 articles at time of recording. But I still have to ask, why is Latin relevant to life today? 

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan. I've always been partial to ancient languages. I started studying Latin at the age of eight and I loved it. Yeah, all right, I was a weird child, but it came in so useful when I was learning modern Romance languages like French and Italian and Spanish. Made them a lot easier to learn. And moreover, Latin taught me so much about English itself. It's the source of two-thirds of the words in modern English. But are these things enough to justify learning something which isn't ostensibly useful in itself? 

Around 10 years ago, I was confronted with that question in the form of 13-year-old boy who had just been uprooted from his school in the USA and dropped in a traditional English public school, where everyone else had been learning Latin from the womb. So he had to play catch-up, and I was hired as his Latin tutor. To be fair, he tried his best to care, but he gave off a very strong "why are you making me do this?" vibe, and I just couldn't give him a decent answer. Turns out I couldn't teach him Latin either, but unless he's now seeking a career in the Vatican, I'd imagine this hasn't hampered his life all that much. So, what is the point? If only Antti had been around then with the answer. 

ANTTI IJÄS: Latin has this prestige as a language that has been used in Europe since the Roman Empire, and it has been continually used all the way up to the 19th century. So this is actually part of a very long tradition, and I think keeping it alive is an aim that sort of justifies itself. So this is part of the European heritage that should never be forgotten. Part of this tradition of using Latin to communicate modern concepts, modern events, and so on, I think it gives you the feeling of belonging to something greater. 

HZ: This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks very much to Antti Ijäs and Nuntii Latini. If you're out of range of Finnish radio signals, you can listen to Nuntii Latini online. I'll link to it at theallusionist.org, and it's also available as a podcast. 

Your randomly-selected word from the dictionary today is…

Skelf. Noun, Scottish. One, a splinter or sliver. Two, informal, an annoying person.

Try using it in an email today.

If you want to contact me, seek out @AllusionistShow on Facebook and Twitter.

Rafe has been in touch. He says, "A friend today mentioned that in game shooting, snipe is considered the hardest test. I'm not a fan of game shooting, but does 'sniper' come from 'a shooter of snipe'?" It does, Rafe. Well done. I pronounce you etymologist of the day. 

And listeners, I welcome your linguistic enquiries, but also I make another podcast called Answer Me This, in which, for the past eight years, I've been answering questions about words as well as a whole load of other things, so give that a go to keep you occupied in the fortnight until the next Allusionist.

Allusionist 4 Detonating the C-Bomb transcript

Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/c-bomb.

This is The Allusionist in which I, Helen Zaltzman, dive under the bonnet of language to tinker with the engine. Coming up in today's show there will be a lot - a lot - of profane language, so this is your opportunity to clear the area of young children, linguistically-fragile elders, anyone within earshot who will be offended by all the potty mouth business.

We'll limber up to the code red swearing with a little light swear word history. 2015 is the 100th anniversary of the first officially recorded instance of the word "bullshit". It was a century ago that T.S. Eliot submitted to Blast magazine his poem entitled "The Triumph of Bullshit". Now, the young T.S. probably didn't coin "bullshit" himself. Usually words have been floating around for some time before they're committed to print and thus considered official dictionary fodder. And the dictionary doesn't even cite him as its first written source. The poem was never published, but it was named in a letter that Blast's editor Wyndham Lewis wrote to Ezra Pound, explaining that while he enjoyed the "scholarly ribaldry" of "The Triumph of Bullshit", he wasn't going to print it, as he was determined to avoid words ending in "-uck", "-unt", and "-ugger". And presumably "-ullshit". So happy bullshit centenary, everyone.

OK, I wasn't kidding about the swearing in this episode, so if you want to avoid words ending in "-uck" and "-unt", this is your last chance. Ready? On with the fucking show.

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SWEAR CORRESPONDENT: I think the worst swear word is probably "cunt", which I don't like to say unless I'm really angry at a politician or something like that. 

Mine would be the word "twat", and I think that that's due to the physical connotations of the word in reference to female genitalia. 

EMMA BARNETT: It is "cunt". 

HZ: Why? 

EMMA BARNETT: Because it's one of those words, like when when you start swearing in front of your parents as you become an adult, which is quite a moment, they flinch. But I still couldn't say the word "cunt" to my mum. I just couldn't. I think the mum test is quite key.

I don't really care about bad swearwords. I don't... I mean, "cunt".

"Cocksucker". "Cunt". 

Probably "cunt". 

The worst swear word I can think of is "cunt". 

DAWN FOSTER Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt. 

Yeah, it's gotta be "cunt", right? 

[Samples of the above clips are edited in tune to the crescendo of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy", with the following lyrics: Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, fuck, pissflaps. Cunt, cunt, mothercuntfucker. Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, shitcunt. Cunt, cunt, fuck, cunt, cunt, jizzchest. Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cock, cunt, cunt, cunt, motherfucker. Cunt, cunt, fuck, twat, minge. Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cocksucker. Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt. Cunt.]

JANE GARVEY: Let's put it this way, it's no coincidence this rudest word belongs to the female of the species and not the male. 

HZ: Jane Garvey, presenter of BBC Radio Four's Woman's Hour. Opinions are Jane's own, and do not represent the BBC. 

HZ: However, "twat" means the same as "cunt", and "twat" is a much lower-level swear. Why the inconsistency? 

JANE GARVEY: I guess... 

HZ: Another four-letter word? 

JANE GARVEY: Yeah. I think "cunt", you know, it sounds a bit ruder. 

HZ: Do you think? 

JANE GARVEY: Does that make any sense? I honestly think it's that simple. 

HZ: Is that conditioning, though, or genuine cuntiness? 

JANE GARVEY: I think it is conditioning. My problem is that we have accepted for too long that that is the rudest word of all. We've let it have some special potency, which, and I simply... I mean, I actually, to be really - some people might think this is obscure - I think there's a connection to stuff like feminine hygiene. Another of my bugbears, when you go into the chemist there's this special aisle, "feminine hygiene". 

HZ: God help any man that wanders into that aisle. 

JANE GARVEY: Why not just call it "sanitary towels and tampons", or whatever you want to call it. 

HZ: "Cunt products". 

JANE GARVEY: Well, that's what they are. 

HZ: Yeah.  

JANE GARVEY: Because apparently we're smelly down there. Now I mean, listen, I'm no woman of the world, but I put it to people that men's genitalia can whiff a bit as well. 

HZ: Where's the men's hygiene aisle? 

JANE GARVEY: I'm going to invent them. "Cock wipes". That's what the world needs. Well, why not? 

HZ: "Knob sponge". 

JANE GARVEY: You said "knob sponge", I said "cock wipe". 

HZ: And so what swear would you rather see at the top of the swearing tree? 

JANE GARVEY: Well, no, if I'm angry with someone I call them a "knob". 

HZ: Quite a jolly one. 

JANE GARVEY: I say they get off lightly. No, I just think if we want to use "cunt", we should say "cunt". 

HZ: Reclaim "cunt".

Of course, cunt has been reclaimed by many before us, perhaps most famously by Eve Ensler in The Vagina Monologues. 

CLIP FROM THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES: I call it "cunt". I've reclaimed it. "Cunt". I really like it. "Cunt". Just listen to it, listen to it. "Cunt".

HZ: But reclaimed from what exactly? A couple of centuries in word purgatory, before which it seems to have been, yes, vulgar, but not particularly obscene. In fact, in the Middle Ages, many of Britain's major towns contained a street called "Gropecunt Lane". That's right. "Cunt" was sufficiently un-rude that it could be a street name, albeit the name for the street where cunt-groping took place, as back then streets were typically named after the activities that took place thereon, and "Gropecunt" was the street where sex workers ply their trade. However, since the mid-16th century, they've all been renamed "Grope Lane" or "Grape Lane" or something else more sanitised, Though I did stumble upon an e-petition to the British government calling for the reinstating of "all former Gropecunt Lanes". It had one signature. 

I'm fine with not having words like "cunt" on street signs, but I am an equal opportunity swearer, and I don't see why the word "cunt" should be kept in solitary when its gentlemanly equivalents like "dick" or "bellend" are allowed to roam fairly freely. I don't imagine, historically, someone decided on a league table for swearwords. Their differing levels of rudeness probably would've been established gradually and largely unconsciously, reflecting the preoccupations and social structures of the time. But there are recent examples of the swearing hierarchy being officially codified. I got hold of one in the form of the manual issued by ITV to television programme makers, in which swearwords and other offensive terms are sorted into Category A, or Category B, and then, within each category, according to several strata of strength. 

LEON WILSON: They are funny, the swearwords. It's just funny, and the different tiers of it. 

HZ: This is Leon Wilson, managing director of Talkback Television and executive producer of Celebrity Juice, one of the sweariest shows on British television. 

LEON WILSON: Someone's had to spend a lot time and money sitting down and categorising all these different words. 

HZ: Which is worst, "bloody", or "knobhead"? 

LEON WILSON: Yeah, I think it probably "bloody", but is it, if it's talking about... Yeah, well, I was going to say something really rude there. "Cunt"s the worst. 

HZ: OK. 

LEON WILSON: Generally that's sort of seen - and it has, you're allowed two per show. Special dispensation, we were allowed four once. 

HZ: Why do you think that there are different rules for "cunt" than for "twat", which is considered a lower-tier swear, but means the same thing? 

LEON WILSON: Because it's not about meaning of what something is. It's about... There's no real logic to it, in a sense. 

HZ: No, why is "cunt" worse than "twat"? 

LEON WILSON: It just is. 

HZ: Why? 

LEON WILSON: I think I would argue that the word "cunt" has got a particularly aggressive sound to it. 

HZ: Do you? 

LEON WILSON: "-unt", the "-unt" is quite a, "-unt" is fairly... Whereas "twat" feels more playful. 

HZ: But to me, "cunt" is quite a playful word as well. It sounds to me like the sound a squash ball makes when it's hitting against a wall. 

LEON WILSON: There was once the lawyer that asked us to bleep "twats", and he argued for it, like you, he said, "Up north, 'twat' means 'cunt', it's the same, so we should bleep it." We argued that we shouldn't, and we actually, it went really quite close to the wire. It was a new lawyer and we had to refer it up, and these things usually get referred up and eventually they came back and said didn't have to bleep "twat". 

HZ: It was good that law time was spent on this. 

LEON WILSON: Oh, a lot of time. The amount of conversations, a lot of conversations we've had, "cunt"s always had to be bleeped. And sometimes we can keep the "cu-" at the beginning, and sometimes they, it's depending on the nature of the "cunt", it's quite interesting. So there are different types of "cunt"s. So there's an aggressive "cunt", for want of a better phrase, where, [aggressively] "You fucking cunt," you know, that's a very aggressive way of doing it, but we'd have to bleep the whole word then. But if it's more of a sort of a playful "cunt" - [playfully] "Bit of a cunt, aren't you?" - that kind of way, then we're allowed a bit of the "cu-" at the beginning, because it's not seen... It's often about the way it's expressed, whether it's aggressive. And generally I would never, very, very rarely, would I ever allow an aggressive "cunt" to stay in the show, because it's very rarely justified. Most television, entertaintment television, shouldn't really have that kind of stuff in it. 

HZ: In the manual, "cunt" is right at the top of Category A, kept company only by "motherfucker". 

LEON WILSON: Originally we were only allowed, we weren't allowed to have any "motherfucker"s in the show. 

HZ: Is "motherfucker" worse than "cunt", then? 

LEON WILSON: "Motherfucker"s used to have to be bleeped as well, but they have now relented on that. They've sort of given up. 

HZ: Ah, so "motherfucker"s alright? 

LEON WILSON: Yeah, but they allow us generally four "motherfucker"s per show. But again, the way "motherfucker"s said is very important, because, weirdly, doing it in an American accent somehow makes it less rude and less offensive. 

HZ: Does that work with "cunt" as well? 

LEON WILSON: Well, I think doing "cunt" in a Cockney accent makes it less. [With accent] "You cunt." 

HZ: [With accent] "You cunt."

LEON WILSON: [With accent] "You fucking cunt." 

HZ: Yeah. 

LEON WILSON: Like, it feels more playful, in the same way, [In American accent] "You motherfucker," feels silly. Whereas if you do, [angrily] "You motherfucker," it feels much more aggressive. And actually aggression is the key part of it, in something not feeling aggressive, is the most important thing that we look at when we look at whether we should keep swear words in show. 

HZ: So British people swearing sounds more aggressive than Americans? 

LEON WILSON: I think so, yeah. 

HZ: But we've got a lot of lower-tier swears that don't really get used in America. So we've got "bollocks", "tossport", "wanker". 

LEON WILSON: Yeah. 

HZ: Is that just because we can't be trusted with the hard swears?

LEON WILSON: I think maybe we've developed a whole other layer to be able to swear in a more conversational everyday sense, to not appear rude. Yeah, I think probably. I mean, there does seem to be an awful lot of British words about, yeah, "bollocks", the testicles basically. 

HZ: Testicles itself isn't on the list, but "bollocks" is fairly low down in category B. You can include it in shows before the watershed, as long as they're not children's shows. "Balls" is considered a little stronger, appearing slightly higher in Category B on the same level as other male genital words like "knob", "prick", and "dick". Though, oddly, "cock" is in the ruder Category A, in the same classification as its female counterparts "twat", "pussy", and "gash". 

Right to the bottom of the chart are the religious swears. I know it wasn't always the case, but I find it a bit odd that religious terms are generally considerably less offensive than bodily and sexual ones. Bodies are mundane, we all have one. Personally, I don't have religion, but if I did, I think I'd be more offended by people bandying around sacred words than slang terms for something as ordinary as genitalia. 

LEON WILSON: "Oh my god" now is seen to be not offensive. People will complain, and there are people out there that will write letters every time someone says, "Oh my god," on TV, there's a couple of people that will do this, but generally though channels have come to the decision in the last 10-15 years that that's allowable. You know, generally it's not a problem. Most people in this country aren't bothered by religion, I would say the majority, but most people still are bothered by sex, and sex will always have a taboo element to it, and therefore swear words will always... Whereas I think religion isn't such a big deal anymore, isn't it? 

HZ: So we're a country of prudish heathens? 

LEON WILSON: Are you just trying to say "cunt" there? 

HZ: I think at this point in the episode, I'd just say it outright if I wanted to. Quantity really reduces the shock quality of a swear. 

LEON WILSON: We are mindful of not having too much swearing in the show, because they lose power over time. I think, in a show like Celebrity Juice, swearing is helpful in certain contexts. 

HZ: Why? 

LEON WILSON: Because swear words have power. They have impact, you know, and you've got to hold some back. I think it would be hard to make Celebrity Juice without any swearing, but I do try and limit it. And when we've got more time in the edits, we do try and take out swear words. We do  remove little... Unnecessary "fuck"s annoy me more. Like some guests will use "fuck" almost as a punctuation, just trying to get a cheap laugh, and sometimes it helps the joke because it adds emphasis, and sometimes it just feels gratuitous and they're just doing it to sort of try and get a cheap laugh. 

HZ: Are you allowed unlimited "fuck"s? 

LEON WILSON: Yeah. They've never placed a limit on the number of "fuck"s in the show, ever. That's more down to us, as a production, trying to self-censor. So the most "fuck"s we've ever had on a Celebrity Juice episode was 110. 

HZ: 110? And how long is the show? 

LEON WILSON: In 33 minutes. 

HZ: Nailing the self-censorship there. What do you think would happen if there was an edict passed tomorrow that just says, "All of our current swears are now neutral, none of them are rude anymore"? Would we have to get by not swearing at all, or would other swears... 

LEON WILSON: Other swears would come in, other swears would appear. There's always something that is taboo. Other words will always replace them, I think, yeah. At my daughter's school they obviously aren't allowed to swear, but they, my daughter's said that the words "you're a swear word" has become a swear word. So they go, "You swear word!"

HZ: So they're self-censoring? 

LEON WILSON: Yes, they self-censor, but now the teacher says, "You can't say 'swear word'," because that in itself became a swear word. So now the kids aren't even allowed to say "swear words", they'll have to think of something else. 

HZ: So it's all about intent, rather than the words themselves? 

LEON WILSON: Yeah. I think that goes back to what I was saying about aggression, whether if it's meant in aggressive way, then swearing is harder to justify. 

HZ: And are your little daughters running around going, "Swear word!" in a particularly aggressive way?

LEON WILSON: Yeah, they do, because I really found this out, one called the other one a "swear word" at the dinner table, and the other one went, "You can't say that, you can't say that!" I said, "What's going on, why you talking about 'swear word'?" And this sort of came out, and it kind of made sense of, you know, something taboo becomes, has power. 

HZ: So perhaps "cunt" isn't really inherently ruder than other words. It's just something had to be rudest. When I was at school, one teacher suggested that in the place of swear words, we all use the word "Jeff", as in the name Jeff. We didn't, and that was for the best. Did she not realise that this was the fastest way to wreak misery upon Jeffs everywhere? Maybe she did realise, and this was an elaborate revenge plot against her ex-boyfriend, Jeff?

Today's show was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Leon Wilson, Jane Garvey, and all the people who contributed swears, especially my friend Tom's mum. She loves to say the word "cunt".

Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…

Maskinonge. Noun. Another term for 'muskellunge'.

Oh, what? What's "muskellunge"?

Muskellunge. Noun. A large pike that only occurs in the Great Lakes region of North America.

Try using it in a sentence today. 

Also try visiting me at @AllusionistShow on Facebook and Twitter, and at theallusionist.org, where, following the last episode, Stephen commented, "May I suggest the origin of 'broad' being the German 'braut'? Noun, bride, a woman taking part in a marriage." Seems plausible to me, Stephen. If I had rosettes for etymologist of the day, I'd give you one. I should get those.

In a fortnight there'll be another episode, with only Category C language and below. But until then... 

[A chorus of voices together say "cunt"]

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. 

---

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.