Allusionist 147 Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 2 transcript

December 7, 2021 The Allusionist

HZ: In 2019, the law changed so that as well as the previously available last name suffixes -son and -dóttir, there was now also a genderfree one, -bur.

ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Samtökin ’78, the national queer organization, worked with Trans Iceland and Intersex Iceland in forming that legislation that added this suffix to the last names. This specific change to the naming laws that we have - because we do have restrictions on what you can name your children and how you can be named yourself - this happened through a different kind of legislation. So it wasn't really a legislation that was meant to change the name laws. It was just the fact that we added a third gender registration.

HZ: In 2019 the Icelandic government, the Alþingi, unanimously voted to add a third option for legal gender: X, neither male nor female.

ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Then of course the naming laws had to be updated to suit that need. So that's why -son and -dóttir didn't work anymore, and there had to be added -bur, or the option to just leave son or daughter or child out.

Allusionist 146 Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 1 transcript

November 24, 2021 The Allusionist

HZ: The Icelandic word for ‘mansplaining’ translates as ‘ramsplaining’. Like the original, it’s a portmanteau, but there’s also a bonus pun in there.

ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: That's hrútar, ram, and explaining.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: The word for explanation is utskyring. So you add in front of it H and R.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: H R, that’s Mr Explaining.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: It becomes hrutskyring.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Hrutskyring, Mr Explaining, herra utskyring.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Hrútar also means a ram, a male sheep, so in many ways it's a very funny word.

Allusionist 145 Parents transcript

November 8, 2021 The Allusionist

FREDDY McCONNELL: A lot of the time when you hear about trans and non binary inclusion in pregnancy care, the idea is that all of this inclusive stuff is additive. It's not meant to replace language that works for the vast majority of people who are pregnant, which are cis women; it's just this is the language you use if and when you do encounter someone who's trans.

Allusionist 144 Aro Ace transcript

October 26, 2021 The Allusionist

HZ: How did it feel when you found the vocabulary to explain yourself?

LEWIS BROWN: Oh, it was so good. I think it's maybe a bit of a cliche to say, but it was like I'd found a puzzle piece. And I was like, "Oh! That makes sense. Right. Yeah. You know, that checks out." It really helps, I think, to have to have a term for it. Before I had words like aromantic and asexual, I don't know, I just had a bad feeling. When I assumed that I did feel attracted to other people and I was kind of thinking, do I just have some trauma or something? Am I just a selfish person? And these are a cruel things to be thinking about yourself. And then I was like, oh, wait, no, no I don't. I can think of all the ways in which I'm a pretty giving person. I care about the people that I care about quite a lot. Just not necessarily in the way that everyone thinks is the most important way.

Allusionist 143 Hedge Rider transcript

October 13, 2021 The Allusionist

Sometimes it would be useful if a podcast had footnotes, wouldn’t it, so that if you came here just for etymology, you didn’t get derailed by a tale of someone frightening off a ghost with semen.

Allusionist 142 Zero transcript

September 25, 2021 The Allusionist

HZ: Zero, out of all the numbers and mathematical symbols, seems unique in being a combination of typographical marker and philosophical vortex. What makes it so special?
KYNE: It's a really interesting number because it's one of the newer numbers really. And there was lots of debate about whether it should count - no pun intended - as a number at all. What is a number in the first place? Can you give a definition without using the word number, like even a synonym, like quantity or amount?
HZ: Damn you, I was going to go 'quantity'!
KYNE: Right? I was like thinking about this earlier, so I wrote down my best definition. This is my best try: "A number is an abstract mathematical object used to describe things." So I know that definition uses the word 'mathematical', which I mean, in fairness is another tricky word to wrangle a definition out of. It's pretty clunky, I know, but...
HZ: You set that rule. You made it difficult you for yourself.
KYNE: I really encourage whoever's listening, try to ask yourself: how do you define a number?

Allusionist 141 Food Quiz transcript

September 10, 2021 The Allusionist

HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Did you know that, Samin, that my nickname for Helen is 'Pizza’?
SAMIN NOSRAT: What? Because of all the Z's?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Because I once told Helen about this atrocious pamphlet that I read at the train station when I was in college. It was for some kind of like - I think it was called student advantage. Do you remember the student advantage card? There was a pamphlet for student advantage card, and they were trying to say like how useful it could be. And they're like, "Everybody knows students need a few extra bucks, whether it's to do laundry, buy some books, or just grab a slice of 'za!" And I had never heard that before, 'za, apostrophe Z A, and I was looking and I was like, "Are they trying to say pizza? They're abbreviating pizza? This is how cool kids say pizza. What is this?" And I felt so offended that they were trying to market, at me, a student, using this kind of language. And I told Helen about this, and then immediately after that she was doing a Reddit AMA and, and I think I went in there and I asked her if she was really hiding the fact that Helen Zaltzman was short for Helen Pizzaltzman.
HZ: Yes, my family shortened it when they moved to an Anglophone country.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah, so now I just call her 'Pizza' for short. Naturally.
HZ: I just think an abbreviation where you understand less what the thing was is not a good one. I suppose you are saving a whole syllable which is half of the effort.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Plus you sound SO cool and SO with it, calling it just 'za.
HZ: And you must be very busy person not to be able to do the full 'pizza'.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: You're a student, you've got skateboarding to do.

Allusionist 140 Num8er5 transcript

August 30, 2021 The Allusionist

STEPHEN CHRISOMALIS: It's very hard, I think, to imagine that we didn't have to do this at all. We could have just not done it.

Tranquillusionist: 282 Salads transcript

August 14, 2021 The Allusionist

Today, I will be reading from the book 282 Ways of Making a Salad.

Allusionist 139 Ladybird Ladybug transcript

July 12, 2021 The Allusionist

Little coconut, tortoise beetle, golden turtle, spoon insect, patch-sewer, umbrella insect, flowery big sister, celestial path insect, red mother, Ali's mother, coral beetle, good luck bug, ladyclock, child of the sun, little midwife, Saint Lucia's little piglet, God's little cow, god's little lamb, god's chicken, devil’s chicken, god's horse, Flying Mary…

Allusionist 138 Mind My Mind transcript

June 27, 2021 The Allusionist

HZ: The term therapy tends to appear in many other contexts, say in ‘retail therapy,’ and I'm just wondering whether that rebounds onto the reputation of psychological and emotional therapy.
LILY SLOANE: Yeah. I mean, many things in life are therapeutic. Sometimes listening can be therapeutic for people. Sometimes going for a walk in the park is therapeutic. Sometimes buying stuff you don't need is therapeutic. But it's not therapy.
HZ: So it's just important to keep the adjective and the noun separated.
LILY SLOANE: And I think the word psychotherapy can be a bit of a turnoff for people seeking therapy. So I'll just say 'therapy' and then they don't know what I'm talking about.

Allusionist 137 Dude transcript

June 10, 2021 The Allusionist

Till about the 1950s, ‘dude’ still had this connotation of someone out of place, a tourist trying to dress like a local and failing. And in that sense, it was gender neutral for a bit. Then, somehow, it became cool.

Allusionist 136 Misogynoir transcript

May 28, 2021 The Allusionist

HZ: What to you was the purpose of coming up with a term for misogynoir?
MOYA BAILEY: It's hard to address something if you can't actually name what it is.

Allusionist 135 SOS transcript

May 13, 2021 The Allusionist

PAUL TYREMAN: Three dots, three dashes, three dots. It's fairly easy to remember, it's easy to key, and it's difficult to confuse with other things.

CHRISTIAN OSTERSEHLTE: Maritime communication, especially in distress case, has to be distinctive, clear, and not subject to misunderstanding.

HZ: The main misunderstanding with SOS is that it stands for ‘Save Our Souls’ or ‘Save Our Ship’ or ‘Send Out Succour’. As if when your ship was sinking, your emergency message would be ‘send out succour’, cmon.

PAUL TYREMAN: It wasn't introduced because it meant anything.

Allusionist Eclipse+ transcript

April 22, 2021 The Allusionist

LAUREN MARKS: Which is an acquired language disorder that comes after you have already honed all your language skills. It just leaves your language impoverished, depending on what type you have. It makes words inaccessible to you.

HZ: At that time, though, Lauren didn’t know that she used to have a full vocabulary and now didn’t, she used to be able to read and now couldn’t, she used to have an internal monologue and now didn’t. And ignorance really was bliss.

LAUREN MARKS: I couldn't have been any more peaceful and satisfied.

HZ: She didn’t have an inner voice telling her to panic - she didn’t have the vocabulary to panic. So she didn’t panic.

LAUREN MARKS: Knowing what you don't know is a really big issue with a brain injury. Language is the organ of perception. So if there is an injury to your perception, your perception can be real off. So in my case, with my aphasia, I didn't know how damaged my language was. I really had no idea. I thought that it was just fine.

Featured

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.

Allusionist 224. Cosmic Hairball

Pack your oxygen tank, we're going up to space. There’s a lot of etymology up there.

Allusionist 223. Bonus 2025

Allusionist 222. A Christmas Carol

Today, we read the novelisation of The Muppet Christmas Carol, also known as the 1843 festive lit hit A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

Allusionist 221. Scribe

"I have never felt so naked. That's how exposed I felt at the idea that my handwriting was going to be seen by the world," says Tim Brookes, founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project and author of the new book about handwriting By Hand: Can the Art of Writing Be Saved? Writing the book (yes, by hand!) celebrates the act of handwriting, even overcoming the shame arising from his own.

Allusionist 220. Disobedience

“The more we look into social structures, the more many of us realize we don't fit into them," says So Mayer, author of the new book Bad Language, "So each phrase or set of vocabulary is another piece of that dismantlement.” We discuss finding vocabulary for oneself, coming out as a speech act, growing up under Section 28, busting through oppression and shame, and joyous listening.