“The starting point is, and the research questions are all framed by: 'We know it's terrible to be fat, but how terrible is it?' Not: 'What would it take to give effective healthcare to fat people?'” says Aubrey Gordon, writer of the new book You Just need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People, star of the documentary Your Fat Friend, and podcaster of Maintenance Phase. And it's not just healthcare where the alignment of 'fat' with 'unhealthy' - and 'thinner' with 'healthier' - becomes problematic and often very dangerous. "I really don't think people contend with the ways in which they are sending a message to everyone around them that there is a weight limit for people that they will love."
Read moreAllusionist 176. Fat part 1
It should just be an accurate descriptor of my body, but the word 'fat' has shaped so much more of my life, and our society. "There is this whole set of baggage that we are all culturally bringing to this word all the time," says Aubrey Gordon, writer of the new book You Just need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People, star of the documentary Your Fat Friend, and podcaster of Maintenance Phase.
Read moreAllusionist 175. Eurovision part 2
Oh, you thought the Eurovision Song Contest was about songs? Or a fun international TV event that brings people together in lots of different countries? Or watching extremely vigorous dance numbers? OK, it is, but it's also about some pretty thorny language-related politics. Historian Dean Vuletic, author of Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest, discusses Eurovision's many linguistic controversies, and the ways the contest has been exploited politically - and caused political kick-offs too.
Read moreAllusionist 174. Eurovision part 1
There aren't many multilingual, multinational television shows that have been running for nearly seven decades. But what makes the Eurovision Song Contest so special to me is not the music, or the dancing, or the costumes that range from spangletastic to tear-off: no, it's the people butting heads about language. Historian Dean Vuletic, author of Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest, recounts the many changes in Eurovision's language rules, and its language hopes and dreams.
Read moreAllusionist 173. Death
"You can't redead the dead by you saying something shit," says Cariad Lloyd of Griefcast and author of You Are Not Alone; nevertheless when you're bereaved, people still are usually so nervous to say the wrong thing that they often don't say anything at all. And especially not the word 'dead'. Maybe what we need, says council funeral officer Evie King, author of Ashes To Admin, is a "jazzy snazzy term for death, the 'bottomless brunch' of death..."
Read moreAllusionist 172. A Brief History of Brazilian Portuguese
"The myths, or the received wisdom, about Portuguese language in Brazil is that, of course we know we speak a very different version of the language, but this has always been explained to us as maybe perhaps a defect of sorts?" says linguist and translator Caetano Galindo, author of Latim em Pó, a history of Brazilian Portuguese. "You look deeper into things and you find you have to wrap your mind around a very different reality.”
Read moreAllusionist 171. Supplantation
Last episode, I mentioned that in London, Ontario, in 2019 a 9-year-old named Lyla Wheeler had launched a petition to rename her street, currently called Plantation Road. This episode, Lyla, now aged nearly thirteen, and her mom Kristin Daley recount the reasons why Lyla campaigned for this name change, how the neighbours reacted, what happened when the wider world heard about it, and why the street's name is still Plantation Road.
Read moreAllusionist 169. The Box
Erwin Schrödinger is one of the "fathers of quantum mechanics". He also sexually abused children. Trinity College Dublin recently denamed a lecture theatre that had been named after him - but his name is still on an equation that won the Nobel Prize for physics. And a cat.
Writer and historian Subhadra Das recounts how and why you rename a university building, and retired physicist Martin Austwick considers that renaming an eponymous equation or theory might be more difficult than unscrewing a sign from a wall.
Read moreAllusionist 168. Debuts
There’s been a recurring theme on the show over the years, of filling gaps in language, removing stigma and bias, finding better ways to express ourselves and talk about our feelings and our bodies. Today Kalle Rocklinger, sex educator with RFSU, the National Association for Sexuality Education in Sweden, talks about how and why over the years, the RFSU has come up with and publicised new terms for body parts and sexual acts, and what they would still like to change. This is the first part of the Telling Other Stories series, about renaming things.
Read moreAllusionist 167. Bonus 2022
What do the hippocampus, homophones, Little Women, worrying and egg hacks have in common? They all star in the 2022 parade of Allusionist bonus bits! This year's guests provide some extra fascinating facts, thoughts and feelings: in order of reappearance, Jing Tsu, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, Tim Clare, Stephanie Foo, Lewis Raven Wallace, Charlotte Lydia Riley, Hannah McGregor, Kristen Meinzer and Jolenta Greenberg.
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