Allusionist 26: Xmas Man - transcript

December 2, 2015 The Allusionist

GREG JENNER: Some Victorian Christmas cards were utterly bonkers. My favourite one just had some bacon attached to it. There’s another one which had a dead mouse on the front. My favourite was a policeman being attacked by a clown with a red hot poker. Another is some children at their parents’ funeral. Classic Christmas fare! There’s one with two children being attacked by a giant wasp…

Allusionist 25: Toki Pona - transcript

November 19, 2015 The Allusionist

HZ: There’s a language which is said to be the smallest language in the world. It has around 123 words, five vowels, nine consonants, and apparently you can become fluent in it with around 30 hours’ study. It’s called Toki Pona.

Allusionist 24: Spill Your Guts - transcript

November 4, 2015 The Allusionist

NK: I definitely wish I would’ve kept a journal in my elementary, junior high and high school years. You know, when you have so many years removed from certain periods of your life, you don’t really remember what it was really like. Your brain eliminates so many memories, you’re only left with specific moments. What a diary gives you is these moments of minutiae, which you managed to write down. The minutiae open up a part of your memory that is more deeply locked away, and allows you to connect to who you were as a kid which your normal memory can’t do.

Allusionist 23: Criminallusionist - transcript

October 28, 2015 The Allusionist

There’s a tricky linguistic balance to strike in crime journalism. At one end, there is a linguistic style which is so dry and technical it makes the story sound, well, boring, and there’s also some danger of making it seem detached from the real damage it caused to people. At the other end of the scale, there’s crime reporting that is as splashy and sensational as fiction.

Allusionist 22: Vocables - transcript

October 21, 2015 The Allusionist

In normal speech, vocables perform various functions - for instance, 'um' and 'ah' buy us time to think, and paper over cracks in our phrases; and babies testing out their vocal cords tend to be pretty keen on the vocables. Not sure they have a wealth of alternatives at that stage, to be honest. So in speech, vocables aren’t meaningful, or consequential, or even intentional - but in song, they can be all these things. All those la la las and dum di dums and bom bom do be de doos are ubiquitous in songs - so what are they doing there?

Allusionist 21: Eponyms I: The Ballad of Bic and Biro

October 14, 2015 The Allusionist

JW: László Bíró would hear people say the ballpoint was ruining writing skills, and he’d smile and say, “Well, if writing comes from the heart, if we can help the hand to perform the hand to perform the task, what’s so wrong with that?” And I think there’s nothing wrong with that. Well done László Bíró.
HZ: I think it’s also interesting that Bíró and Bic's names are on products that are hugely successful, but rarely the centre of attention - and also disposable.
JW: Yeah. And also they are kind of disposable, in that you can know what a Bic or a Biro is, but you don’t need to know who Marcel is or who László is. They’ve made this disposable contribution to history, and in the same way made themselves disposable.

Allusionist 20: Baby Talk - transcript

October 7, 2015 The Allusionist

[baby voice] Wook at your widdle face. Who’s a cutie pie? Who’s a cutie pie? Here comes the aeroplane - [cough] [/baby voice]

When you’re talking to a baby, it’s hard to maintain dignity. In fact even the baby, who can’t talk, thinks jigsaws are for eating, and is probably sitting in its own effluvium, is more dignified than you at that point.

But, good news! All those stupid voices, and banal rhetorical questions, are helping the baby to learn language.

Allusionist 19: Architecting About Dance - transcript

September 23, 2015 The Allusionist

“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture,” said Elvis Costello. Or Frank Zappa. Or Gore Vidal. Or Laurie Anderson. Or Steve Martin. Or the comedian Martin Mull.

I think this is a problematic statement, not just because nobody can agree on who came up with it. But because dancing about architecture doesn’t seem particularly far-fetched - they’re both visual, in fact each medium could probably elegantly reflect the other. Talking about dance, however, is really difficult.

Allusionist 18: Fix, part II - transcript

September 11, 2015 The Allusionist

HC: We ended up discovering that there is a whole other group of English speakers you don’t normally think of. It’s a very small group; they speak a very strange version of English; and they’re some of the most powerful people on the planet. They probably directly influence your lives. And they speak a strange pidgin of English, known as Euro English, or Euro Speak.

HZ: Who are ‘they’? European Union officials.

HC: Euro English is the English spoken by technocrats at the EU. Most of them don’t speak English as a first language, so what’s happened is they’ve kind of misappropriated English words and misunderstood what they mean, or invented new words.

Allusionist 17: Fix, part I - transcript

August 26, 2015 The Allusionist

Most of the questions I get asked about the English language can be boiled down to this: why is English such an idiosyncratic mess? And why has nobody tried to sort it out?
Well, some people did kind of try. For hundreds of years, English had been a swirling concoction full of Latin, German and French thanks to all the invasions of Britain, plus words English had nicked from other languages, all refusing to behave regularly or obey rules consistently, and riddled with silent Gs.

300 or so years ago, some decided they had HAD ENOUGH.

Allusionist 16: Word Play - transcript

August 12, 2015 The Allusionist

LESLIE SCOTT: Not many people realise the success of Scrabble is based on a statistician figuring out the scoring system - it's the first time someone had a word game where the score of the word game was based on him researching very thoroughly the number of times a particular letter was used. He scoured the New York Times for years counting how many times an E comes up, a Z, etc. Hence the numbers of those letters in the stack to start with was based on this, as is the scoring. And it works, whether or not you like the game. We have a mathematician to thank.
HZ: Probably why it’s not fun.

HZ: Sorry, Scrabble. But a game where you can triumph just by memorizing every two letter word will never have my affection.

Allusionist 15: Step Away - transcript

July 29, 2015 The Allusionist

Since 'step-' indicates the biological and possibly emotional distance between relations, I had assumed that etymologically, that was where the term originated - the idea of someone being a step away from the family. But step the family word, and step as in to tread, have totally different roots - and very different meanings.

Allusionist 14: Behave - transcript

July 1, 2015 The Allusionist

Thanks to your own brain, words have the capacity to become your worst enemy.

JG: it could just be a random word, something attached to something you know, or something that you happened to be thinking at the time you were feeling awful so it became the word that means something bad.
HZ: No words are safe.
JG: No! Because that part of our mind just mashes things together in different ways, and if it mashes two things together at a time when you’re feeling a certain way, that connection sticks, which is where the therapy comes in - unsticking those things.

Allusionist 13: Mixed Emojions - transcript

June 17, 2015 The Allusionist

Emoji - the 'e' means picture, 'moji', letter in Japanese - seem like a very modern phenomenon, dependent on the proliferation of mobile phones. But they have precedent in language far more ancient than our own. A picture per concept is pretty much what the ancient Sumerians were using to communicate some 5,500 years ago when they came up with the cuneiform writing system.

Allusionist 12: Pride - transcript

June 3, 2015 The Allusionist

New York City in 1970. Homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness; gay sex was punishable with fines and prison sentences. A police raid on the Stonewall Inn on Christopher St on 28th June 1969 sparked the Stonewall Riots, after which the gay civil rights movement was gathering momentum, and pride began to mean something more.

CS: My name is Craig Schoonmaker, and in 1970 I authored the word ‘pride’ for gay pride. Somebody had to come up with it!
We had a committee to commemorate the Stonewall riots. We were going to create a number of events the same weekend as the march to bring in people out of town, and wanted to unite the events under a label. First thought was ‘Gay Power’. I didn’t like that, so proposed gay pride.
There’s very little chance for people in the world to have power, but anyone can have pride.

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Allusionist 233. Phobia

'Phobia' gets used for anything from a mild aversion to a debilitating anxiety response to various forms of bigotry. Deboki Chakravarti and Sam Jones of the podcast Tiny Matters join to consider the term from its comedic origins with one of the founding fathers of the USA, via rabies and Greek deities, to its role in their lives today.

CONTENT NOTE: we’re not trying to stoke anyone’s phobias, but we do discuss some common phobia-inducers, including snakes, germs and small holes, and there’s a brief mention of tarantulas. There’s also talk about OCD and rabies.

Allusionist 232. Vega

What do you call yourself if you're a part-time vegetarian? What petty linguistic things would you change? And what do you do if people gripe at you if you say that you are bi or pan? To answer these questions from the Allusionist mailbag are esteemed alumsionists: Hrishikesh Hirway and Samin Nosrat of Home Cooking podcast; academic and author Alex Ketchum; lexicographer Kory Stamper; and linguist Lauren Gawne of Lingthusiasm podcast.

Tranquillusionist: cheesy cheesybobs

This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, say a series of words to relax your mind, replace a hectic interior monologue, maybe lull you to sleep, hopefully quell the mental uproar just for a little while.

Today: nicknames for woodlice AKA rolypoly bugs AKA slaters AKA all these other things; and a list of cheeses from Great Britain and Ireland.

sorry lads, we're getting bad ads

TL;DR version:

For the show's financial survival (hopefully), over the next few weeks I'm having to switch on programmatic advertisements. This means, for the first time in the show's nearly 12-year existence, you may be subjected to ads that are not voiced, scripted and individually approved by me.
If you would prefer to listen to the show without ads in it, patreonise the show at the Gravy, Wedge or Check tiers, which include the perk of an ad-free RSS feed.

Click through to read the rest of the post about why I’m doing this thing I don’t want to do.

Allusionist 231. Lingthusionist

“Linguistics and language is such a good mechanism for being curious,” says Lauren Gawne, linguistics prof, author of the book Gesture, and cohost of the podcast Lingthusiasm. I'm in vacation mode (although not on actual vacation alas), so today's episode is a fun chat with our nice pal about making language podcasts, the firey digestive punishments for linguistics researchers, working in reality television, and cute tame nouns versus scary intimidating verbs.

Allusionist 230. Draculae part 4: Transformation

Throughout the Draculae miniseries, about the Swedish and Icelandic translations of Dracula that played fast and loose with the original text, I've been wondering a couple of questions: why are cover versions of songs and remakes of films so normal and acceptable, whereas cover versions in book form cause such a stir? And do these Scandinavian Draculae count as fan fiction? And if not, why not? Fansplaining.com's Elizabeth Minkel explains what fan fiction can mean.

Allusionist 229. Draculae part 3: Hunting Down the Count

Many mysteries accompany the revelations that Powers of Darkness, the Icelandic and Swedish versions of Dracula, are not direct translations of Bram Stoker's original, but stories that significantly differ in character names, plot and runtime. Like: did Bram Stoker write it himself, to publish some raunchy content that British censors would forbid? Was Powers of Darkness based on his early drafts? And did he really not copyright Dracula in the USA was that a deliberate ruse? Welllll... brace yourself for ole thrill-destroyer Zaltzman to pop your balloons of excitement.

queer playlist

Allusionist 228. Draculae part 2: Surprises in the Vaults

Happy World Dracula Day to all who celebrate!

This is the second episode of the Draculae miniseries, about a literary mystery which came to me via a meme: “Someone translated Dracula into Icelandic, and it took over 100 years for anyone to point out he just made a fanfic rewrite of what he wanted the story to be.”

In Draculae part 2, Ásgeir Jónsson explains how he got that Icelandic adaptation of Dracula back into print, to little fanfare - but then Dutch scholar Hans Corneel de Roos set about making an English translation. Following that: like me, Will Trimble also got meme-struck, and that propelled him to get a translation of the Swedish version that begat the Icelandic one.

Before listening to this, check out the first episode of the Draculae miniseries explaining the three versions of Dracula: Dracula published by Bram Stoker in 1897; the Icelandic version Makt Myrkranna by newspaper editor Valdimar Ásmundsson, serialised in his newspaper Fyallkonan in 1900-1901; and the Swedish version Mörkrets makter by an author known only as A—e, and serialised in a couple of Swedish newspapers 1899-1900.

Allusionist 227. Draculae part 1: Enter the Castle

A literary mystery came to me via a meme.

Allusionist 226. Suburbia

"The word ‘suburbia’ sort of evokes a very fixed idea of a place that is identikit, that all suburbs are the same, that within the suburb everything is the same, that all people are the same, all experiences are the same," says social historian and author John Grindrod. "I think it has this kind of flattening-out facility, that word, that isn't true."

Allusionist 225. Hues

You know what's an absolutely pesky kind of word to define in a dictionary? Colour names. A passel of lexicographers spent years - decades, even - trying different ways to describe colours in words for Webster's Third International Dictionary. It was such a huge, complicated effort that it took twelve years for former Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper to write a book about it.