Hear this episode and find out more about the topics covered at theallusionist.org/alarm-bells
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, lie about language’s whereabouts.
In today’s episode: as the climate changes, so does the vocabulary around it - to amplify concern, to dampen concern, to serve corporate concerns. There’s a whole lot going on with it.
Alright, on with the show!
ROBIN WEBSTER: I think I'd get rid of most of the words in the climate change conversation! I'd just quite like to start again.
ALICE BELL: One of the big problems about working climate change is that I think we still have quite a limited vocabulary in terms of how do we talk about this? And because it's scary, because it's abstract, we have all those extra challenges about how are we going to talk about this anyway.
HZ: Alice Bell here has to talk about it, though, because she’s director of communications at the climate charity Possible and the author of the new book Can We Save The Planet?
ALICE BELL: I think climate change has been allowed to stay dormant in terms of language change, and just culture generally, because we've been avoiding talking about it. I'd say that we are generally quite inarticulate when it comes to climate change. But we have seen the power of new phrases helping unlock some new conversations in the last year in particular: ‘climate crisis’ I think is one of them.
HZ: In May 2019 the Guardian Newspaper announced that they were updating their style guide to replace the term ‘climate change’ with ‘climate emergency, crisis or breakdown.’
ALICE BELL: The Guardian have said that it's their style guide now to say that, and to say ‘global heating’ rather than ‘global warming’.
HZ: What's the difference between global heating and global warming?
ALICE BELL: I'm not entirely convinced that there is that much. I'm a bit of a global - I'm not a global heating sceptic, in that I believe it is happening. However, I am just sceptical that phrase is going to catch on; but we'll see. I still think it looks a little bit odd.
HZ: Maybe 'warm' doesn't sound hot enough to make people scared.
ALICE BELL: I think that's part of it. It's questionable about whether these words will be enough to scare us or whether fear is actually the action that we want to trigger. I think one of the reasons for using 'climate crisis' rather than 'climate change' is that people want to alert other people to the fact that it is a problem and that they should be worried. A piece of environmental psychology that a lot of us in climate change campaigns use, which is this idea that if you hear a fire alarm, or even if you smell smoke, you probably won't act until you see other people starting to act.
HZ: Because you assume it's a practice.
ALICE BELL: Yep. It's not the alarm itself that's what sets you off; it's watching other people run in with water. And there's lots of things you can do to be that signal in the world, of being someone running in with water to help other people realize that it's real and make it real and that it's something they need to be worrying about. But saying 'climate crisis' rather than 'climate change' is one of those things. And I don't think it's going to work on its own. There's sometimes a tendency among campaigners to be like, "if I find this perfect phrase, it's going to unlock action, and then we'll live in a utopia!" And I don't think language works like that, but it will play a role. It's not that it has no power at all.
HZ: Sometimes that power has been to play down the problem of humans’ climate impact.
AMY WESTERVELT: Language actually comes into this a lot. There's so many ways that the industry has tried to use mucking with language as a way to really kind of own and shape the story.
My name is Amy Westervelt and I'm a captain of industry. No, I'm just kidding.
HZ: You've got an oil derrick in your back garden.
AMY WESTERVELT: Yes. I'm a corporate titan. No, my name is Amy Westervelt and I am a climate journalist and a podcaster who does the podcast Drilled.
HZ: Drilled is a podcast about the creation of climate denial. Not the denial of the existence of climate, but the denial that climate has been changing in a negative way, and that humans are the primary cause.
AMY WESTERVELT: Even the term 'climate change' was something that that sort of PR guys came up with, a right wing PR guy, Frank Luntz.
HZ: Frank Luntz didn’t coin the term - it had been around for a few decades already - but when he was working for George W. Bush’s administration in the early 2000s, he encouraged this linguistic shift.
AMY WESTERVELT: And it was created with the sole purpose of making climate change seem less dangerous, because they thought it sounded better than global warming. They thought it sounded more natural. You know, like it's just a natural phase. It happens. It's not necessarily human. There's no active verb happening like 'warming'. It's just change, man. It happens.
HZ: Frank Luntz has since disavowed this move.
AMY WESTERVELT: Language and climate is a really interesting topic because it is a space on all sides, but definitely in the journalism realm, too, that's been largely shaped by the industry, the oil industry, and therefore softened in all these weird ways that you almost don't even notice until you think about it again. Why was it so effective?
HZ: Do you think it's because people wanted to believe it, because believing the reality is very uncomfortable and terrifying?
AMY WESTERVELT: Yeah, I think so, I think it's a much more pleasant thing to think that, oh, climate change has just been made up by a bunch of people who are getting rich off of solar or like a bunch of hippies who hate capitalism, than that it's a real thing and that a lot of the things that we like to do contribute to it, and that the impacts, if we don't change pretty dramatically the systems that govern how we live, are going to be catastrophic. I think people have a real hard time like dealing with radical change in general. Actually 'radical' is another really interesting term as it's used in the climate space. This idea of any action, it has been sort of painted as radical, but like, the inaction was also very radical.
HZ: Do you think the word ‘alarmist’ is used to kind of dismiss people as well?
AMY WESTERVELT: Yes. One of the most effective strategies that the fossil fuel industry uses is to label their opponents with these words that start to take on negative meanings. So if you look at the data on climate and you're concerned about it, you're an alarmist. The whole way that people will use ‘moderate’ or ‘pragmatic’ I think is very problematic, you know, because usually it refers to doing the least possible thing, which is actually kind of radically irresponsible at this point, not moderate at all. And also there's this whole thing that happens where the sort of moderate, quote unquote, moderate approach gets cast as basically not taking a view, you know, like, "Oh, well, I think we should do something, sure. But I'm not like, you know, I'm not an extreme climate person” or “I'm not a climate alarmist." But actually, that's still a viewpoint. There's no default position where you're not actually still taking a position, even if you're saying we shouldn't do anything on climate at all - that's still a very clear position and it's very extreme at this point.
ROBIN WEBSTER: There's a phrase which is often used in the green energy debate, which is "Let's have a green revolution." And I think an interesting thing about that word is it sounds brilliant if you're from a slightly more left-wing political persuasion. But one of the interesting things about the climate change conversation is it has become extremely politically polarized, often for not very good reasons.
HZ: This is Robin Webster, senior climate engagement strategist for the climate communication organisation Climate Outreach.
ROBIN WEBSTER: And the word ‘revolution’, if you come from a more conservative perspective, is terribly offputting. So we could be using language where we talk about continuity, we talk about avoiding waste, we talk about not losing our landscapes. All of that language can be really, really powerful and important to somebody of more conservative political background. People should stop using the word ‘revolution’, because it means so much and it shouldn't be used flippantly, and you should think about what it means to people from all sorts of different backgrounds.
HZ: So try to use words that suggest a significant change that's a positive one, not a traumatic one?
ROBIN WEBSTER: Yeah, I think a lot of this is just thinking about what does this word mean to somebody who's different from me? And it's often very difficult for us to think about that, to put ourselves simply in someone else's shoes and think, how can I say the same thing in a slightly different way, in a way that's not going to set off all sorts of alarm bells in somebody else's head?
HZ: Or, not ring any bells in someone else’s head, because they have no idea what you’re on about.
ROBIN WEBSTER: I am as guilty as any, having worked as a sort of techie professional in this for a long time of writing those sentences that go "By 2050, the trajectory of the curve will be movement this and carbon capture and storage," these paragraphs that just mean nothing to nobody. And they are about things which are far away in time, far away in place. We were using these words like ‘sustainability’ and ‘trajectory’ and ‘parts per million’. And I was like, what on earth is this language? It doesn't say anything.
HZ: ‘Parts per million’: that's the stuff to get people up and ready for action.
ROBIN WEBSTER: 450 parts per million, let's go!
HZ: As well as the specialised technical and scientific vocabulary perhaps being alienating or perlexing or even boring, Robin thinks discussions about climate have often had the wrong focus.
ROBIN WEBSTER: The climate change debate has been couched in a conversation about energy a great deal. And it's true that fossil fuels are major driver of climate change, of course, that is scientifically accurate. But part of the other things which are about the way we live our lives, about our relationship with nature, about the things around us in the day to day basis, got slightly lost from that conversation. And it became a kind of esoteric debate about the development of different sorts of renewables systems, which is very far from what most people want to know about or think about in their daily lives.
HZ: Alice Bell also has a problem with the term ‘renewable energy’.
ALICE BELL: So that comes partly from the difference between one that has a finite resource and one that can renew itself. Totally makes sense. Except that the problem with fossil fuels now isn't that we're going to run out of them. For decades people were worried about what we would do if we ran out of coal. You see people first researching solar and wind in the 19th century, and partly that was because they could tell how damaging coal was, because you couldn't tell how damaging it was to the climate, but it still caused lung disease and made everything sooty, and made your clothes really dirty. People didn't like the grubbiness of coal. They were looking for alternatives. But they were also like, well, logically, we're gonna run out of the stuff. But the problem we now know is that if we burnt even a small amount of the stuff that we know about, let alone the stuff we haven't really worked out - there might still be more that we haven't found yet, or we haven't found ways of accessing it - the fact that we can run out of it is the least of our problems, basically. So ‘renewable’ is maybe not the right phrase.
ROBIN WEBSTER: The reason why I think I don't like the word ‘renewable’ is it's a techy word, renewable energy is a tech conversation. And I think the climate change conversation just really has suffered from being a tech conversation.
HZ: How do you how do you feel about the word ‘green’?
AMY WESTERVELT: Interesting one. It's useful sometimes. And it's kind of this it's an easy, short word that, you know, people found convenient. But it's been I feel like it's just it's been used so much more by the industry that it just sort of has that taint to it. I'm pretty much always suspicious when someone pitches me on something that's like “the green blah” or even eco friendly, because I just feel like usually it's kind of like a product sales tactic or like a product marketing term. So, yeah.
HZ: It's soft again.
AMY WESTERVELT: And it's soft.
HZ: Eco friendly - it might be better than some of the alternatives, but it doesn't mean it's good.
AMY WESTERVELT: Yeah, exactly.
ALICE BELL: And then people use 'clean energy' and, you know, is it that clean?
ROBIN WEBSTER: Yeah, that one's quite depressing as well. There's lots of very good reasons to use the word ‘clean’ in the context of clean energy, as in it sort of has lots of amazing resonances. And it's true, the concept of clean energy as opposed to dirty energy. So in climate change communications, the word ‘clean’ is used a lot in the context of energy. But I think a bit like ‘sustainable’, it has kind of lost its meaning. And also it's a little bit too judgmental?
HZ: It sounds moral, doesn't it?
ROBIN WEBSTER: Yeah. And this kind of idea of kind of moral judgment is something that's really embedded in the climate change conversation and terribly damaging. And I don't know if you ever had that experience of, if you stop talking to somebody about being interested in this kind of issues and suddenly you become sort of like their conscious input embodied, their conscience on legs, and they suddenly say, “Er, um, yes, I've only flown once in the last year,” because there's this feeling of of blame, of personal blame that's really embedded in in this conversation, which stops people engaging with it.
HZ: Oh good, good; the vocabulary is too technical for people to engage with, or too guilt-inducing to engage with. The language around climate is fraught! Even for the professional climate communicators like Alice Bell.
ALICE BELL: I was talking about this with a colleague earlier and she was saying, "You need to be careful about using the term ‘fossil fuels’, that's something that some researchers suggested that we should be wary of, because it automatically gets you labelled for some communities as an activist because it shows that you've got an interest. Whereas if you say coal, oil and gas, that's a more general term. But fossil fuels are seen by some people as being something that just activists say."
HZ: It's weird because coal and gas are more specific terms.
ALICE BELL: Yeah, they could be. But you get different communities that all look at different terms in different ways.
HZ: The term ‘fossil fuels’ sounds like your car is fuelled by liquified dinosaurs. But before ‘fossil’ meant ‘the relics of ancient organisms’, the term probably reflects a sense of the word ‘fossil’ that predates its meaning. More than 400 years ago, ‘fossil’ referred to things that had been dug out of the ground, and that’s the meaning that lingers in ‘fossil fuels’. Anyway, maybe ‘non-renewable resources’ would be a more fitting term?
AMY WESTERVELT: I really feel like we need to come up with a different term entirely for natural gas, it just sounds so beautiful and good.
HZ: Greenwash, noun: disinformation disseminated by an organisation so as to present an environmentally responsible public image. A term coined in 1986 by American environmentalist Jay Westerveld, no relation to Amy Westervelt here.
AMY WESTERVELT: It's been well-known since the early 90s that natural gas comes with very heavy methane emissions, and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. So for whatever it cuts on CO2, it more than makes up for in methane. But because it was branded as this perfect bridge between fossil fuels and alternative energy like solar and wind and whatever, it's been very, very hard to shake that idea. And that reputation really enables a lot of bad policy-making that delays the very big shifts that need to happen to actually act in a meaningful way.
ROBIN WEBSTER: I think that's something interesting sometimes about words that that have just been used for so long within a debate that they've lost their meaning, even if they had a really decent meaning in the first place. I am terribly bored of the word ‘sustainable’. It's a word that arose in the 1990s. And, if you get into the guts, sustainability is about trying to find a future. And it's been turned and kind of manipulated. And often it means sustainable, as in people using the phrase sustainable business as in let's keep sustainably doing the same thing. And it's just a word that has been battered to death.
ALICE BELL: When I see 'sustainable' I often think it's jargon. That's another reason why it's corporate. It's something that corporate sustainability people might use because they are a sustainability person.
AMY WESTERVELT: It's really interesting, actually, I think the terms definitely changed. It was greenhouse effect, then global warming, then climate change. Climate change was like when the industry took charge of the language. And so this emergence of ‘climate crisis’ is really a key indicator that that era is ending, which is good.
HZ: The greenhouse effect was identified in the 1820s by French scientist Joseph Fourier, but it was described in different metaphors - hotbox, leaky vessel, solar oven - until the start of the 20th century, when in 1901 the Swedish meteorologist Nils Ekholm wrote a paper comparing the atmosphere to the glass of a greenhouse, and then in 1909 the English scientiest John Henry Poynting wrote the first known use of ‘greenhouse effect’. But:
ALICE BELL: It's not actually a very good metaphor. So if you talk to climate scientist, they'll be like, "It's not a greenhouse, it's not a greenhouse!" And so I think that's one of the reasons why we've stopped seeing it so much. So like when I learned about climate change at school, probably similar to you, you probably had a little diagram in your textbook of the earth in a little greenhouse looking a bit hot. But you'd have these cartoons, you see them in campaign materials, that sort of thing. And I think scientists saying "It's not really worked like that, it's kind of more like a blanket." Although I find if I talk to scientists about this, they're like, "It's like a blanket, but like a wet, warm blanket." And I think, "This doesn't sound very nice." And also, I don't think that's helping me think about the earth heating up if it's a wet blanket. For most of us, it doesn't really matter if the mechanism for heating is something like a greenhouse or like a blanket. But it's quite a poor metaphor, so it's kind of weird that that's what we talk about.
HZ: Is it like if someone's wet the bed, the mattress is warming up, but not in a good way?
ALICE BELL: Maybe. Maybe I'll try that on some people next time I have to explain.
HZ: Try that. Climate bedwet. You're welcome.
HZ: See? Putting it into terms people can understand and identify with. Although the downside there is that while euphemisms help us digest ideas that we might otherwise be daunted or terrified by, they can also lull us too much.
ROBIN WEBSTER: It's been a terribly euphemistic conversation. But we have seen this enormous evolution over the last 12 months. And I think the protests that erupted last year did an enormous favour in terms of language, because they really did start to shift these kind of phrases around climate emergency and climate crisis have, I think, entered the lexicon and made people feel something different in response to when they hear that language, and I think that is really important.
HZ: Feelings - got to get people in their feelings.
ROBIN WEBSTER: And I think this thing of ultimately it being a scientific discipline, that's originally where the kind of language of climate change has come from. And this sort of facts- and figures-based information does kind of enter a certain part of your brain, you know, enters the rational part of your brain, not the emotional part of your brain. And I think we have needed language to enter the emotional part of your brain. When we sort of talk about stories that we've experienced as people, how we came concerned about climate change, what we're doing about it now: that's a lot more powerful to other people than hearing about what you know about sea level rise in 2050 or whatever.
HZ: Aside from sharing stories rather than graphs, there are terms which facilitate communication about climate.
ALICE BELL: We've seen that plant-based foods, flight shame, climate crisis: these things have not in themselves changed the world, but have started to give us a few more tools to talk about climate change. ‘Flight shame’: it is really interesting to look at that working across Europe and how different countries have different words for that in their own languages, and the fact that you've got a term for it has helped journalists write about it and then people talk about it. And people thinking about limiting their flight has become more viral just because we have language about it. There is research showing that if you cut flying and do for environmental reasons and talk about it with your friends, they are more likely to cut their flying, too, and also to support policy changes to have more sustainable travel. So we know that talking about flying is really powerful, and so words that can allow us to do that more are really important.
ROBIN WEBSTER: Up until very recently, we talked a lot about the idea of climate silence, about the idea that people are not having conversations about climate change, because it's almost like we created some kind of social agreement that it wasn't polite to do so.
HZ: Well, it is uncomfortable to think about wrecking the world.
ROBIN WEBSTER: Yes. Exactly. There was an interesting set of principles, or people were saying, “No doom and gloom in the climate change conversation. Let's not talk about the impacts of climate change.” And Extinction Rebellion last year sort of came along and blew some of that out of the water, which was extremely interesting. And I think one of the reasons it did is this idea that pairing negative impacts with the idea that there's something that you can do. And also because we're now living in a moment where we can authentically and truthfully talk about the impacts of climate change and see them happening in the world around us. And people are becoming more aware of that. And I think people get really stuck on this idea of how do we talk about the negative stuff. And I think what we're seeing from what's around us and from the research is you can talk about the negative stuff, so long as it's paired with a feeling that's somewhere to go with it, something that you can do with it, a community to become a part of, something that you can do. And then, as people, we’re able to kind of activate those negative emotions and do something with them.
HZ: Alice and Robin both told me that if you work in climate, people fall over themselves to express contrition for the flights they’ve taken or beef they’ve eaten.
ALICE BELL: I think a lot of people who work in climate change find this. They find that people like to confess to them. Something that's happened more and more recently, as a climate writer recently said, she feels like she's some kind of climate nun, because people come coming to her - I am not going to absolve you of your sins. However, I'm actually okay with the fact that you've done this thing or that thing; for all that I want really big, ambitious climate action, I'm not going to complain about your recycling. So maybe let people know that you're not going to judge them. But part of that can probably be best signalled by just listening and seeing where they're coming from. And if they need to express that guilt, maybe letting them, but equally, letting them know that they don't have to do that. And if they're talking about things that they're doing that are positive, being interested and letting them talk about that enthusiastically, I think is really important. And sometimes you need to not think about it to get to get through the day. But also you need to be able to think about what you can do to take action and how you can have a positive impact. And sort of balancing the fear with the courage.
ROBIN WEBSTER: We asked, what's the biggest challenge that stops you having conversation about climate change? A lot of people said, “I don't know what to do about it.” And then conversely, we also found the people that were having the most conversations were often using their own experience of - you know, there were people that were able to say, “Well, I decided to cycle with the kids to school rather than take the car, or I've slightly changed my diet and all these things.” And they didn't have to be massive changes, but they were changes that were sort of a part of somebody's identity. You sort of shift and then you feel, well, I'm doing a practical thing and therefore I can talk about my practical thing in the context of this conversation and then it becomes a slightly less terrifying conversation. So a lot of that challenge feels to me often about helping people find out what the thing is that they can do. Like how can they start down that route? What you do by yourself, it feels insignificant. And I think as people, we're drawn into doing things by other people. And our sense of identity is built by what how we see ourselves and also what we see other people doing. So don't feel like your own actions are insignificant, because actually they're often very significant to the people around you.
ALICE BELL: Once people have stopped trying to absolve their climate sins, if you work in climate change, after they've told you all the times they've eaten beef, they'll then ask you what gives you hope. I might answer with stuff that gives me courage and tell them that's a difference and invite people to think about what gives them courage. What gives you climate courage, what lifts your spirits and makes you think “I can get on in the day, I can be part of something, I can do this”?
It's about thinking about positively about future rather than feeling really bad about the past.
HZ: Robin Webster is senior climate engagement strategist for the climate communication organisation Climate Outreach.
Alice Bell is director of communications at the climate charity Possible.
Amy Westervelt is a climate journalist and she makes the podcast Drilled.
And in today’s Minillusionist, we consider another euphemism: ‘climate denier’, as well as fake greenness.
MINILLUSIONIST
HZ: AstroTurf, noun: artificial turf, originally called ChemGrass.
Astroturfing, noun: the deceptive tactic of simulating grassroots support for a product, cause, etc, undertaken by people or organizations with an interest in shaping public opinion.
AMY WESTERVELT: This practice is called astroturfing and they will create fake advocacy groups that that sort of look like their consumer advocacy groups that are actually funded by industry. I don't know. I feel like anytime you see something that's like 'Consumers for Freedom' or like 'Drivers for Safe Vehicles' or like these these sort of - I don't know, it's hard to explain. But I sort of every time I see one, I'm like, hmm, is that really a consumer group? You see it in like the the plastic realm as well, where they were trying forever to brand plastic pollution as marine debris. Anytime I see a non-profit that's like "we're trying to reduce plastic globally" and then they talk about it as marine debris, I'm like, oh, this is probably an industry backed front group. Oh, and it almost always is. But you can also spot them by like, if their cause seems like something that the average people probably wouldn't take the time to organise around, then it's probably an industry group. Like on the plastic side, there's the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, which I find the most hilarious example that like there's tons of consumers out there that are just agitating for plastic bags.
HZ: Well, some people got to be edgelords.
AMY WESTERVELT: Yeah! On the climate side, if you see people that are that are pushing things like sensible solutions or bipartisan pricing on carbon or bringing industry to the table like all of that stuff, it's usually an industry group. They've also totally picked up on the whole like civility, civil discourse, like can't we all just get along kind of thing? Like the new American Petroleum Institute ads are all like, you know, we all need to come together and come up with a sensible solution on climate change. It's like, OK. But you guys pretended it didn't even exist up until like two years ago.
HZ: Did they mean a sensible solution that allows them to carry on exactly as before, but not feel bad about it?
AMY WESTERVELT: Exactly. Yeah. Also, actually, another good thing to look at, too, I see this on the solutions side a lot - if it's a solution in air quotes that basically doesn't require the fossil fuel industry to change at all, then it's probably something where the research and development has been funded by industry.
HZ: Euphemisms came up earlier in the show, and here’s another: ‘climate denier’.
AMY WESTERVELT: I don't feel like the term 'climate denier' is a super powerful term.
HZ: It feels a little too generous, where they're like, "Eh, I just don't buy it" rather than they are dangerously staring in the wrong direction.
AMY WESTERVELT: Then somehow that's been adapted to ‘climate sceptic’?
ROBIN WEBSTER: A lot of climate change deniers have been really offended by the word 'denial' and its connotations and have preferred to prefer to use the word 'sceptics', and that's been a whole little fight all by itself.
ALICE BELL: People who might self-define as a sceptic started complaining about being called deniers because they said that it was done deliberately to associate them with Holocaust deniers, and it was done to tarnish their names. At which point, people turned around and were like, “no, there's all sorts of deniers. We weren't trying to do that.” But then some people were like, “oh, we don't want to hurt your feelings; obviously, we're not doing that.” And so they started calling them sceptics, because they felt that was more accurate. And then you get people going, "But I'm not a sceptic. I'm a warmist." There are very few people who are outright deniers of climate change. Almost no people who believe that. And even the people who have been really quite hardline climate sceptics are moving more towards now saying, oh, yeah, there's a bit of warming; it's just not as bad as it as everyone says it is. They're sometimes known as climate warmists.
AMY WESTERVELT: Why not just ‘liar’? ‘Liar’ is fine. ‘Propagandist’? That's good, too.
ALICE BELL: The people who are really evil are the people who do believe in climate change. The people who genuinely know; they've had research since the 60s; they funded some of the best early research in climate change because they worked at the companies that knew they needed to do that; and they still funded work to try and seed doubt in other people's minds there. But they're not themselves necessarily sceptics. They believe in it. That's why they're worried about it.
The Allusionist is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best podcasts around. Find all the shows at radiotopia.fm.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
jouissance, noun, French, formal: pleaure.
I think that means the term is formal, not that the pleasure is formal. Whatever that would be.
Try using it in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with help from Martin Austwick, who also provides the music for the show - find his songs at palebirdmusic.com. Thanks to Rekha Murthy and Jim Footner.
Special thanks to Gary O’Connor and Leah, ace supporters of Radiotopia.
The Allusionist will be on a bit of a hiatus until May, so I can work on more languagey intrigues for you, plus to take the break that a number of you advised me to have after you heard me on ZigZag podcast’s episode about burnout last year.
In the meantime, listen to my other podcasts Veronica Mars Investigations and Answer Me This. Keep in touch on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram - I’m allusionistshow on there. And to hear every episode, read transcripts, see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, etymology and all, and all Allusionist matters, visit the show at its forever home theallusionist.org.
