Exclamation; sign of agreement OR disapproval; gendered, but circumstantially gender-neutral; term of endearment: 'dude' can do it all! But its connotations of a laid-back, cool, masculine person are only a few decades old; before that, it meant...an uptight city-dwelling tourist?? Dude, seriously!
Read moreAllusionist 136. Misogynoir
“It's hard to address something if you can't actually name what it is,” says Moya Bailey, who coined a term that enables people to discuss a specific combination of racism and sexism: misogynoir.
Read moreAllusionist 134. Lacuna
If you were in Brazil during the military dictatorship of 1964-1985, tried to bake a cake from a recipe in the newspaper, and were served with a sorry mess that tasted disgustingly salty, it wasn't your fault. What you thought was a recipe was actually a message from the newspaper that they were being censored.
Designer and researcher Crystian Cruz opens up the TOP SECRET files, to share the fake weather reports, single nipples vs a pair, soap opera characters getting bumped off, and the problems with kung fu.
Read moreAllusionist 133. Cake is Mightier than the Sword
What to do to stick it to the powers that be? Send your message through something they really care about: cake.
In Buenos Aires, local tour guides Madi Lang and Juan Palacios introduce me to priest's balls and little cannons, the pastries laced with the sweet taste of 1880s trade union protests.
Read moreAllusionist 131. Podlingual
In their podcasts Mija and Moonface, Lory Martinez and James Kim create autobiographical fiction in multiple languages.
Read moreAllusionist 130. Valentine
St Valentine's name may nowadays be all over the romance-related merch for 14 February, but he was also the patron saint of beekeepers, epilepsy and plagues. Let's get to know this multi-hyphenate saint a bit better.
Read moreAllusionist 129. Sorry
Apologies are such important verbal transactions. So why are so many of them soooo bad? Susan McCarthy and Marjorie Ingalls from SorryWatch and Laura Beaudin of fauxpolo.gy pinpoint what to look out for, to sort the apologies from the fauxpologies.
Read moreAllusionist 128. Bonus 2020
To round off the year, here are some choice cuts from the Allusionist vault of interesting things that guests said that there wasn’t room for in the original episodes. Brace yourself for a vivid name for dust bunnies, the scary side of glamour, another reason to be grateful for bears, and Schrödinger’s Fart.
Read moreAllusionist 127. A Festive Hit for 2020
The usual canon of Christmas songs may not really fit people's moods in this year 2020, when I'm not sure a lot of us are feeling all that holly jolly. So I drafted in singer and songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs and we wrote a festive song that is suitable for 2020.
Content note: there are swears. Several of them.
Read moreAllusionist 126. Survival: Custodians of the Languages
In Australia, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of languages. Until English arrived.
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