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.
Read moreTranquillusionist: 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.
Read moresorry 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.
Read moreAllusionist 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.
Read moreAllusionist 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.
Read moreAllusionist 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.
Read morequeer playlist
Hello! Here’s a playlist of episodes of the show that are particularly relevant in Pride month - but also at any time of year.
Polari was a secret language that was used mostly by gay men in London. And now lives on in the non-secret lexicon - you might not realise that you know some Polari words!
Two Or More is about the bumpy life of the word ‘bisexual’, describing things from oysters to space stations to God to hats and then people, where things get really complicated.
Parents is about how some of the vocabulary of pregnancy and parenting might not fit when you’re trans, and how to make the language gender-additive.
Many Ways At Once. The Scots language didn’t have much of an LGBTQ+ lexicon. So writer and performer Dr Harry Josephine Giles decided to create one.
Rainbow Washing examines the trends in corporate performative allyship, and considers how to sort the real queer support from the harm-disguise.
Similarly, Queerbaiting follows a term from entrapment to marketing to the failures of onscreen representation.
Name Changers features listeners telling the stories of why they changed their names - often a big feature of a gender journey.
There’s so much more to say about the word Queer, where it has been and where it is going now.
Survival: Bequest is about the Māori word ‘takatapui’, a bit of linguistic evidence that prior to the European colonisation that imposed cisgender monogamous heterosexuality, Māori culture had included myriad sexual orientations, gender fluidity and polyamory.
Survival: Today Tomorrow part 2 is about how new queer words are coined for the Icelandic language.
No Title is about making language gender-free. And there are unbeatable arguments to fell anyone who denies singular ‘they’, should you need those in your arsenal.
Joins is about how the available vocabulary for body parts can be a liability when you’re trans and/or non binary.
Aro Ace is about how newish words like ‘aromantic’ and ‘asexual’ enable people to voice their identities, and to find each other.
Serving C-Bomb examines how some terms from the ballroom scene in New York City in the 1990s became mainstream in the 2020s.
Suburbia discusses queerness in British suburbs.
Pride, about why the word ‘Pride’ was chosen to be the banner word for demonstrations and celebrations of LGBTQIA rights and culture.
And if you just need to shut off your internal monologue for a bit, you can replace it with a relaxingly scored list of gay animals.
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.
Read moreAllusionist 227. Draculae part 1: Enter the Castle
A literary mystery came to me via a meme.
Read moreAllusionist 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."
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