The Allusionist
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The Allusionist
Adventures in language with Helen Zaltzman. TheAllusionist.org
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239 bölüm
218. Banned Books
It's Banned Books Week. Honorary youth chair Iris Mogul and Sam Helmick, president of the American Library Association, talk about what it is, why it...
217. Bread and Roses, and Coffee
In their heyday of the 1970s and 1980s, there were more than 200 - possibly more than 400 - feminist restaurants and coffee shops in the USA and Canad...
216. Four Letter Words: Terisk
Watching the film Legally Blonde one day with the subtitles on, numerous perfectly innocuous words were partially asterisked out, because of a technol...
215. Two-Letter Words
Listener Erica commented: "Perhaps an idea for a bonus ep of Four Letter Word season would be one on two-letter words: there’s an established list tha...
214. Four Letter Words: Bane Bain Bath
For today’s instalment of Four Letter Word season, we’re hopping from ‘bane’ to ‘bain’ to ‘bath’, via poison gardens, doll’s eyes, alchemists, placent...
213. Four Letter Words: Dino
The latest four letter word of Four Letter Word season is dino. 'Dinosaur' is derived from Greek 'terrible lizard', and they could have called it 'who...
212. Four Letter Words: Park
Get in, winner: we're going on a field trip. We're spending the day in five of Vancouver's city parks with Justin McElroy, Municipal Affairs Reporter...
211. Four Letter Words: -gate
The other day was the 53rd anniversary of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, which not only caused a lot of political uproar, it had a big linguisti...
210. Four Letter Words: 4x4x4 Quiz
Four Letter Word season continues with a quiz (which is a four-letter word itself) about four letter words. Test your etymological knowledge, and hear...
209. Four Letter Words: Serving C-bomb
Ten years ago, on the fourth episode of the show, I investigated why the C-word is considered a worse swear than the others. Since then - well really...
208. Four Letter Words: Ffff
Welcome to Four Letter Word season!
We're kicking off with one of the most versatile words: it can be a noun, verb, punctuation, expostulation,...
207. Randomly Selected Words from the Dictionary
Happy tenth birthday to this show! To celebrate, here's every randomly selected word from the dictionary from the first decade of the show.
Vis...
206. Bonus 2024
It's the annual parade of Bonus Bits - things this year's guests said that I couldn't fit into their episodes, and/or weren't about language, but now...
205. Lexicat, part 2: now with added Dog
In Lexicat part 1, we met the author Mary Robinette Kowal and her cat Elsie, and learned about how they communicate via a set of buttons programmed wi...
204. Lexicat, part 1
Elsie the cat has a set of 120 buttons programmed with words. She uses them to lie, swear, apologise, express grief and frustration and love to her hu...
203. Flyting
In 15th and 16th century Scotland, in the highest courts of the land, you'd find esteemed poets hurling insults at each other. This was flyting, a sor...
202. Singlish Singlish
There's so much more to say about Singlish after last episode that we're saying some more of it this episode. Poet and academic Gwee Li Sui, author of...
201. Singlish
"If you grow up being told that one of your first languages, Singlish, is actually a bad version of an already existing language, you kind of get this...
Tranquillusionist: Ex-Constellations
This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, give your brain a break by temporarily supplanting your interior monologue with words that...
200. 200th episode celebratory quiz!
I can scarce believe that I've made 200 episodes of this show, but here we are! To celebrate, here is a quiz about language where all the questions we...
199. 199 ideas that I hadn't made into podcasts yet
Next episode is the 200th, therefore this is the 199th. I raid the 66 pages of ideas for episodes I have been keeping for nearly a decade, and present...
198. Queer Arab Glossary
Since 2019, Marwan Kaabour has been collecting Arabic slang words used by and about queer people, first for the online community Takweer, and now the...
197. Word Play 7: Word Sport
At the Scripps National Spelling Bee, behind the spectacle of kids vying to be champion spellers, a whole lot of work goes on to make words into this...
196. Word Play 6: Beeing
I went to the 2024 Scripps National Spelling Bee, to marvel at kids spelling words I had mostly never even heard of. But when you’re at Bee Week, the...
195. Word Play 5: 100 Pages of Solvitude
Cain's Jawbone, a murder mystery cryptic puzzle novella in the form of 100 pages presented in the wrong order, has many millions of possible solutions...
194. Word Play 4: Good Grids
Exciting things have been happening with crossword puzzles in the US: more constructors, more outlets to get puzzles published, clues and answers that...
193. Word Play 3: Lemon Demon
AJ Jacobs makes The Puzzler podcast, wrote The Puzzler book, and sometimes turns his whole life into a puzzle. He comes bearing word games, explanatio...
192. Word Play part 2
This episode, and the next couple of episodes, are about word games! Today, Joshua Blackburn recounts how his sons' uninspiring English homework led t...
191. Hypochondria
The word 'hypochondria' has travelled from meaning physical ailments in a particular region of your body, to ones that are only in your mind. It has b...
190. Craters
"It's quite a big undertaking going through every named feature in the whole solar system and trying to find out who that person was."
When PhD...
Tranquillusionist: Person In Scene
This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, soothe your brain by saying a load of words that don’t really mean very much, to give you a...
189. Mouthful of Fortune
At Lunar New Year, certain foods are particularly lucky to eat. Why? Because in Chinese, their names are puns on fortunate things. Damn, maybe noodles...
188. Lipread
Lipreading has been in the news this month, thanks to gossip-stoking mouth movements at the Golden Globes that the amateur lipreaders of The Internet...
187. Bonus 2023
It's our annual end of year parade of all the extra good stuff this year's podguests talked about, including a mythical disappearing island, geese, hu...
186. Ravels
We’ve got knitting! We’ve got eponyms!! We’ve got knitting eponyms!!! Which come with a whole load of battles, f-boys, duels, baseball, espionage, sca...
185. Gems and Patties
We’re returning to the theme of renaming, for two food-related renamings: the first one that mostly happened, the second that mostly did not - but in...
184. Misophonia
The word 'misophonia' describes a condition that statistically, 20 per cent of you have: an extreme reaction to certain sounds. "For me, it was a reli...
Apple Fest!
All aboard, we're off to the 2023 Apple Festival at the University of British Columbia, to taste some apples and, most importantly, enjoy some apple n...
183. Timucua
When Spanish missionaries arrived in what is now called Florida, there were 100,000-200,000 Timucua people in the region. Just two centuries later, th...
182. Siblings of Chaos
Lexicographer, author and Dictionary Corner resident Susie Dent has been studying words to make us feel happy. She brings etymologies concerning cows,...