Next episode is the 200th, therefore this is the 199th. I raid the 66-page documents of ideas for episodes, that I have been keeping for nearly a decade, and present to you 199 ideas that I have not yet made into podcasts (except for this one).
Read morelive tour of the UK!
The Allusionist is going on a live tour of the UK in August and September 2024! It’s an all new show of stuff that has not been on the podcast (and may never be), about frenemies and strong font-based emotions and unintentional swears. It is called Souvenirs, and will be feelgood and fun to watch.
All dates are on sale now, check theallusionist.org/events for ticket links.
Preemptive answering of questions:
Read moreHey! You! Be in the 200th episode
The 200th episode of the Allusionist is coming up pretty soon, and I’d like us to have our annual quiz - listen to/play along with the previous ones here. But this time, I want to be able to play along too, so I would love for you to provide questions for the quiz.
They can be multiple choice, or a format of your own devising; they just have to be about language in some form. And you can deliver them in either voice form or written, if you’d prefer for me to read it. Whichever way you do it, remember to give a name and pronouns you want me to use to refer you; pseudonyms are fine, whatever you’d prefer. Deadline for submissions is 6 September 2024.
If you want to check that your question hasn’t already been covered on the show, the lexicon page lists words that have been featured on the show before.
Written submissions go into this Google Form; you’ll be able to edit them afterwards if you need to.
Spoken submissions go into this little recording thingy just below. If you make a mistake, I can edit it out! So you just need to go back to the start of your sentence and say it again.
Allusionist 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 newly published Queer Arab Glossary. "When researching for this book, I discovered so much of the sociopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and historical layers that make up the words," he says. He also discovered quite a lot about frying, white beans and worms (metaphorical ones).
Read moreAllusionist 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 word sport.
Read moreAllusionist 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 competitive spelling is merely the tip of the icebee.
Read morePride playlist
Hello! Here’s a playlist of episodes of the show that are good to listen to for Pride month, but also at any time, because they are some of the most interesting and complex language matters that I’ve covered in the show:
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.
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.
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.
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 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 but only one that is correct. 86 years after it was published, writer, comedian and crossword constructor John Finnemore solved it. And then, craving another 100-page cryptic puzzle murder story, he wrote his own.
Read moreAllusionist 194. Word Play part 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 would never have appeared even a few years ago, and puzzle packs raising a whole lot of money for charities and humanitarian causes.
Read moreAllusionist 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, explanations of anagrams being used to precipitate wars and were key evidence in trials, tips for writing with a quill, below-the-knee insults, and tales of living constitutionally.
Read more