"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 sense that “I'm just bad at language,” says Bibek Gurung, a former linguist who grew up in Singapore speaking Singlish with his family and friends, while schools and the government tried to quash it. "Language is a fundamental human skill. And to just have this sense that you're bad at this very fundamental skill really does a number to your self esteem and your abilities to communicate in general."
Read moreAllusionist 163. Rhino Borked Guy
Provoked by current events, we've got three political eponyms for turmoiled times. Get ready for explosives, presidential pigs, Supreme Court scrapping, and wronged rhinos.
Read moreAllusionist 126. Survival: Custodians of the Languages
In Australia, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of languages. Until English arrived.
Read moreAllusionist 118. Survival: Bequest
When the Europeans arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as guns, stoats and Christianity, they brought ideas of cisgender monogamous heterosexuality that were imposed upon the Māori people as if there had never been anything else. But one word, takatāpui, proved otherwise.
Read moreAllusionist 56+12. Joins & Pride
To celebrate Pride Month, I’m playing two of the Allusionist episodes that have stuck with me the most during the show’s existence.
The first is Joins. You listeners talk about your particular experiences in your trans bodies, dealing with the available vocabulary for sex and the associated body parts.
Second is Pride: the story of how that word was chosen in 1970 for LGBTQ Pride events.
Read moreAllusionist 81. Shark Week
What is the expression 'beyond the pale' on about? How do you express the absence of feeling? Does 'testify' have anything to do with testicles? Do avocados have anything to do with testicles? How does the phrase "It's all Greek to me" relate to food styling? Can you have a caper with capers? Are sharks misunderstood, etymologically and morally? And finally: where do allusions come from?
Read moreAllusionist 79. Queer
Strange or obtuse; a stinging homophobic slur; a radical political rejection of normativity; a broad term encompassing every and any variation on sexual orientation and gender identity: the word 'queer' has a multifarious past and complicated present. This is just a fraction of it.
Tracing the word's movements are Kathy Tu and Tobin Low from Nancy podcast, Eric Marcus from Making Gay History, and historian and author Amy Sueyoshi, with Jonathan Van Ness from Queer Eye.
Read moreAllusionist 77. Survival: Second Home
There are two main places in the world where the Welsh language is spoken: Wales, and the Chubut Province in Patagonia. How did this ancient language take root in rural Argentina, 12,000 miles away from its home base?
Read moreAllusionist 65. Eponyms III: Who's That Guy?
Roman Mars returns for our annual dose of eponyms - words that derive from people's names. This year: explosive revelations about the origins of the word 'guy'.
Read moreAllusionist 12: Pride
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"The poison is shame. The antidote is pride."
It’s June; the President of the USA has officially designated it LGBT Pride Month, and there’ll be Pride events around the world.
Activist and the publisher of Homosexuals Intransigent Craig Schoonmaker recounts how the word ‘pride’ was chosen, which eventually came to be the banner word for demonstrations and celebrations of LGBT rights and culture.
ADDITIONAL READING:
In the episode I contemplate the history of the word 'lesbian', and if you're also interested to know how 'gay' evolved from 'colourful' or 'cheerful' to its present meaning, read about it here and here.
For background on the Stonewall riots whence arose the Pride movement, listen to this short oral history on Witness by the BBC World Service. I haven't seen the Stonewall Uprising documentary, but the transcript is interesting.
Craig Schoonmaker mentions the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organisations in the USA. Here's a short history; this was its mission statement (from probably the mid-1960s), and here's what the FBI thought of it.
Fred Sergeant remembers the first Pride march.
Barack Obama officially proclaims June 2015 to be Pride Month.
There is a movement called Gay Shame, founded in 1998 as a protest against/alternative to what they saw as the overcommercialisation and conservatism of Gay Pride. Read about them here.
There is a transcript of this episode here.
CREDITS:
L. Craig Schoonmaker has several websites, including Mr Gay Pride, featuring articles and materials going all the way back to 1969; the Mr Gay Pride blog is also very interesting. He also runs a photo journal about Newark, NJ, as well as a version making the case for phonetic (fonetik?) spelling of English.
This episode was produced by me and Eleanor McDowall of Falling Tree, with help from Peregrine Andrews.
All the music in this episode is by Martin Austwick. Hear and/or download more at thesoundoftheladies.bandcamp.com.
Find me at facebook.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/allusionistshow and twitter.com/helenzaltzman.
