There’s something I trip over regularly in the Allusionist.

Dates.

It comes up often in this show: “A bit of ancient Greek happened in 350 BC! A word came into English via French in 700 AD!”

That’s 350 Before Christ, 700 Anno Domini, the year of the lord (the lord also being Christ, in case you were expecting it to be the New Zealand singer Lorde).

The thing that makes me pause: Christ… he’s not my guy. I’m not religious at all. So every time I label a year BC or AD, I think, “Am I really allowed to, having not opted into the religion whose figurehead’s putative birthdate is the fulcrum for this whole system?”

And I know some of you will be screaming at me, “Helen! Just substitute BC and AD with BCE and ACE, Before Common Era and After Common Era! If it’s good enough for the United Nations, it’s good enough for you!”

But here’s my issue with BCE and ACE: they are still referring to the same Christ-based dating practices. They might not be using Christy language, but the language it is using aligns commonality with Christianity.

I’m not trying to erase the contributions of Jesus Christ to the culture in which I live. I merely want to know how he came to be so integral to our system of dating.

LEE: Hello, my name is Lee. I'm a genderqueer trans masculine gay guy and it's time for me to talk to Helen Zaltzman about my genitals.
So there's actually a lot of different contexts in which genitals come up, and there's different language for each of them. For me as someone who was assigned female at birth and has a vagina has a uterus but mostly passes as male, there's a lot of different things that go into what I'm choosing to call my genitals.

LORELEI: I sometimes like to refer to my genitalia as “anachronistic”, which seems to fit perfectly. I have a friend who refers to my genitalia as “the factory-installed equipment.”

HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: My name is Hrishikesh Hirway. I'm the host of Song Exploder. Helen, I can't stand the word ‘namaste’.
HZ: Really? Why?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Well, first of all most of the time when you hear it in America it's not even pronounced correctly. People say nama.... I can't even do it. Na Mas Te. NAMASTE!
HZ: What are we supposed to say?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Namaste. Namaste. The T has a little T-H. Namaste.
HZ: I’m going to have to practise in my own time. That is a difficult consonant to achieve. I’ll practise by myself; it’ll be less humiliating than with you here, with pity in your eyes.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: That’s not pity, it’s judgement.
HZ: OK. It's mispronounced. That's the first problem.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: All the time. And then it gets used. You know, I live in LA, which is probably the global hub of McDonald's yoga; and every time it's said you know with this sanctimonious kind of, "Oh, namaste," and I'm like, first, if you're going to use it in this kind of faux profound way, please learn to say it correctly.
HZ: Do you attend yoga classes ever?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I do sometimes go because in things both linguistic and physical, I'm not very flexible.
HZ: So it's trying in two ways.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah.
HZ: And what happens if someone says it to you?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I stay silent. I'm like, do you do you notice that the only Indian person in this room is not saying it?

EMMA BRIANT: The category of migrant is one that embraces a lot of different groups. This is simply just somebody who is moving one place to another, and that might be internally within a country, or it might be between countries.
HZ: What does 'immigrant' mean?
EMMA BRIANT: 'Immigrant' is relational. So it's somebody who's coming into the country. So when the British media is talking about immigrants, they're talking about people coming to Britain. When the French media is talking about immigrants, they're talking people coming into France. ‘Emigrant’ means people leaving, so people who migrate from Britain to France or to anywhere are emigrating to that country. So it is just about the direction of travel basically.
HZ: And what’s the distinction between ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘refugee’?
EMMA BRIANT: A refugee is somebody who, according to the Refugee Convention, is fleeing war and persecution, torture, this kind of thing; political oppression. And that is a category they have to prove they are in that position. So somebody who is trying to become a refugee is called an asylum seeker. So they haven't had their case heard yet. And once their application has been heard,  if it's worked successfully and it's not rejected, then they become a refugee, and they are entitled to be treated the same as any other citizen in the country, so they should be entitled to everything another citizen would get. These kinds of categories get used very indistinctly, and I think there's an awful lot of misunderstanding.

HZ: How do you make the words tormenting your brain behave themselves?

JANE GREGORY: It’s basically stripping it of any meaning at all, reducing it back down to a series of letters or a string of letters that don’t actually have to mean anything. If you have a random thought that doesn’t mean anything to you, eg the sky is orange, you don’t latch onto that and think, “What’s wrong with me, thinking the sky is orange?” or “The sky must be orange, because I had that thought”. But if you had the thought, “I’m a failure,” when that pops into your mind, for some reason you pay attention to that as if that’s true.

With the term ‘sanctuary cities’ in the news a lot in the past few weeks, our Radiotopian sibling 99% Invisible just made a two-parter tracing the origins of the modern sanctuary movement, which provides refuge for the persecuted, the vulnerable and, lately in particular, undocumented immigrants. So I wanted to dig further into the word ‘sanctuary’, which derives from the Latin ‘sanctuarium’, a sacred or private space. Its root was the Latin word ‘sanctus’, meaning ‘holy’.

That there is a religious element in ‘sanctuary’ isn’t surprising: buildings of worship provide protection and safety during the modern sanctuary movement, as they have throughout history.

Since the mid-16th century, the word ‘sanctuary’ has carried the more general sense of a place of refuge, not necessarily a religious one.

But before then, the word had a meaning that is a pretty big contrast to the modern sanctuary movement: for at least a thousand years in England, until James I abolished it in 1623, sanctuary was not for people fleeing injustice, but for people fleeing justice.

JOHN JENKINS: If you'd committed a crime, if you could get yourself to a place of religious significance - a church, a cathedral, even things like a monastery or an abbot's house or in some respects, even just land that belonged to the church or was near to it, then you were able to effectively evade justice for a period of time.

KAITLIN PREST: It's hard to describe feelings with words, with the English language that we have.
HZ: Oh good. It's not just me.
KAITLIN PREST: No! Oh my god! I've dedicated my entire life to trying to do this and I still find it close to impossible. It's hard to take a physical experience that is quite vivid and try to filter it through our brain, which is rational and intellectual, and then come out with a piece of language that can get at even the beginning of what that physical experience is like.

HZ: Stupid useless language!

KAITLIN PREST: I have had to face the question of “how do I translate this experience in writing?” I've done a million pieces about masturbating, like how do you how do you put to words what's going on here in a way that actually translates the experience? The experience of masturbating is really sexy, but even the word 'masturbate' is disgusting. It's my favorite thing to do. Least favorite thing to say.
HZ: So do you have a word that you prefer for it?
KAITLIN PREST: But that's the thing! There's no alternative that feels right to me. No.

The War on Christmas - when did that start? Upon the birth of Jesus Christ himself, when King Herod ordered all the baby boys in and around Bethlehem be killed? In 1644, when Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans passed an ordinance prohibiting Christmas celebrations?

In 1659, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans managed to get Christmas banned for 22 years for being a pagan festival?

Or, was it in 1998, in Britain’s second largest city, Birmingham? If you picked up practically any newspaper at the time, you would have read that Birmingham city council had renamed Christmas ‘Winterval’.

ERIC MOLINSKY: It was a dark and stormy night.

I know that’s the ultimate cliché, but if there ever was a story that began on a dark and stormy night, this was it. It was the middle of June 1816, when Mary Shelley started writing a novel called Frankenstein; or the New Prometheus.

But here’s the funny thing: usually we celebrate the year a work of art came out, which in this case would be 1818 because Mary Shelley spent two years writing Frankenstein. So why are we celebrating the moment of inspiration? Because June 16, 1816 – not just what was happening in Mary Shelley’s room that night, but what was happening around the world - might actually offer us a glimpse into our future.

Each of the 50 states in the USA has its own motto. The motto might be found on the state seal, or the state flag; more often than not, it might be in Latin; it might be a phrase or a single word.

If you reside in the USA and you’re thinking, yeah, I know my state motto, it’s on all the license plates: ‘Montana: Big Sky Country’, say, in, or ‘Florida: The Sunshine State’ or ‘Famous Potatoes’- get in, Idaho.

Sorry, friends, these are not the state mottos.

ROMAN MARS: Would the Heimlich Manoeuvre be something that people knew if it wasn't attached to a name like Heimlich? No, I don’t think so.

HZ: Would it have made the news in May of this year when 96-year-old Dr Henry Heimlich himself saved a woman from choking on a piece of hamburger meat by using the manoeuvre that bears his name?

RM: So I still like eponyms in these ways that they help tell an interesting story. But I totally get why and I'm not so tied to my world view or nostalgia that I cannot accept that it would be better another way.

HZ: Well, good, because there are certainly some aspects to eponyms that I don’t think you’d like, Roman.

JENNI RODD: So what we're trying to understand is the processes that are going on in your head right now as you try and understand what I'm saying.

HZ: Jenni Rodd is a cognitive psychologist at University College London, and I think she can look right through my skull to see those processes at work.

JR: If I could do that, that would make my job a whole heap easier. Unfortunately we can't look directly into your brain, so we have to come up with cunning and devious experiments that are the next best thing.

HZ: Experiments studying how people respond to language, written or spoken, sometimes while the subject undergoes an fMRI scan - functional magnetic resonance imaging - to show what the brain is up to.

JR: But what we want to understand is for each word that you hear, or possibly read, what it is that you're doing in your head to figure out what that individual word means, and then how you put those together to understand the meaning of sentences, paragraphs, conversations and so on.