Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/bonus2020
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, feel like I'm playing opposite language in a long-running production of Waiting for Godot.
Today’s episode is some choice cuts from the Allusionist vault of interesting that interviewees said that there wasn’t room for in the episodes on which they originally appeared. Prepare to learn some interesting terms, and another reason to be grateful for bears.
I just wanted to tell you some good news too: after last episode, where we wrote a festive hit for 2020, we put the song ‘Don’t Wait for Me Beneath the Mistletoe’ by the Allusionettes on Bandcamp, Apple, Spotify etc. I wasn’t expecting anyone to buy it, but to my happy surprise some of you did, so I thought, alright, whatever the song raises in sales, I will match and donate the lot to the Trussell Trust, a charity which works to stop hunger and poverty in the UK, and Hestia, a charity which supports people in crisis. Then Martin Austwick, who cowrote the song and played instruments, said he would also match the sales, so you buying the song and each of us matching it has, at the time of recording, raised £1821 for charity. What a result! And it’s lovely to hear from you who’ve added the song to your playlists. I was in the supermarket the other day when they were playing the classic Christmas hits about togetherness and happiness, and I was inner screaming pretty loudly. So I think us writing a 2020-appropriate alternative was the right call.
And now on with some bonus Allusiobits! I have got to think of a better term...
HZ: Historian Kate Lister appeared on the episode My Dad Excavated A Porno, about the history of pornography, and a theme that came up was Victorian Britain’s, er, self-flagellating attitude to sex.
KATE LISTER: Outwardly, everybody in the Victorian era was like, no, we behave ourselves, we don't do this. But behind closed doors, yeah, there was lots and lots of erotic art - some of the great artists of the day were secretly doing erotic sketches. Turner, for example. Turner of the landscape. People don't know that very much about him; when he wasn't doing these amazing landscapes, he was living with a mistress, and he travelled around Europe, he visited lots of brothels and he sketched all the women in them. There's really erotic, explicit images, and he filled sketchbook after sketchbook and no one knew about it. And when he died, the executor of the estate was John Ruskin, the famous Victorian prude who apparently freaked out because his wife had pubic hair, which isn't true. But he was definitely quite prudish. And he was absolutely devastated when he found these drawings because Turner was his absolute hero, he idolized him. He put him on a proper pedestal. And now there's all these pictures of him shagging women. He was devastated. So he organised to have them burnt. But we don't think that he did actually burn them, because so many of them survive; they're in the Tate Museum now today, you can go and see them. But that's the Victorians in a nutshell, really: to the outward world, you're painting lovely water colours and face and landscapes and then in secret you paint people shagging each other. And then you'll say that you'll burn them because they're so obscene. But you don't really, you just pretend that you have. That's the Victorians all over.
HZ: Something else Kate and I got to talking about was the word ‘slut’. There’s lots to say about the word ‘slut’ and its reclamation - I’m making a note to myself to cover it properly on the show. My mother still uses the word in its original 15th century sense of an untidy or slovenly woman: “If I don’t vacuum, people will think I’m a slut!”
KATE LISTER: I love that. Because it meant originally someone that was dirty. It meant a woman, it was a gendered term, but it meant it was dirty. So you would say that you were a right slut, and that would mean that you were kind of lazy like a slattern. And it's brilliant because obviously, to us, it has a completely different meaning. So when you're looking back at old texts and they're talking about 'slut holes' that need clearing out, it makes us fall about laughing; but what they actually mean was like a hole that was just full of rubbish and crap in the street, that you'd put coal into and store there. And there's something that was called ‘slut wool’ as well. You know when you lift up the sofa or the bed and you call them dust bunnies now, all those balls of dust - that was slut wool once upon a time. The suggestion being that you were so lazy, that only lazy women have this this fluff. So yeah. Slut wool.
HZ: On the episode Food into Words we heard from MiMi Aye, food writer and cohost of the MSG podcast. Here she is with the Burmese equivalent of ‘bringing home the bacon’.
MIMI AYE: A pork fund is basically... My mum's from a town just outside of the Shan State. It's called Mogok and basically they're mad about pork, they'll do anything that they can with it. So they dry it and turn it into, I suppose, a bit like pork scratchings; but it tends to be things like the intestines, very crunchy little things. And they'll pickle it, and they'll make sausages and they'll make curries and stuff. But because it's so important, they don't talk about bringing home the bread, they talk about bringing home the pork. So a pork fund is basically "wet-thar bo" which means that "I'm going out to earn money for pork" is what they say.
HZ: That's very motivating.
HZ: Staying with food for a moment: in the Apples episode, we heard from apple historian Joanna Crosby.
JOANNA CROSBY: There's botanical reasons why the apple is a successful fruit, in that it has evolved to be very tempting. There is a theory that the original apple was spread across northern Europe, before humans came along, by bears, which I rather like this theory of bears picking apples and eating them.
HZ: And pooping the seeds around?
JOANNA CROSBY: Exactly yes. So that the bear does what the bear does naturally a little further along the wood and up comes another apple tree. And apples are polymorphous, which means that each pip, when you plant it, comes up as an individual apple in its own right. So apples are like children: however many times you try, you can't get the same one twice. So each pip that you plant from your lovely apple from say your Cox's Orange Pippin is not going to come up as a Cox's Orange Pippin; it's going to come up with the characteristics of both its parents, but it will be unique and individual. So that's how you get new varieties of apple, and that's how the apple evolved into a bigger sweeter apple quite naturally before humans came along and interfered, because those were the ones that the bears and the early humans went for. So the apple realised that if it was going to get spread along it needed to appeal to us.
HZ: Gosh. So a lot of our apple varietals have been determined by the taste of bears.
JOANNA CROSBY: Well, it could be. Yes. Certainly by the taste of bears and early man and anything else eating it too. Yes.
HZ: And apples also snuck into languages.
JOANNA CROSBY: The Celts had a whole beautiful language to do with apples, and lots of folk stories to do with apples. Probably the most well known one is the Isle of Avalon where King Arthur was taken after the last battle and where apparently he lives in rest and will one day return to save Britain but the Isle of Avalon means the Isle of apples. So 'ava' in the Celtic language is apple. And there's lots of different stories about magical apples and apples that sing to you and apples that however much of it you eat it never grows any less.
HZ: Do you think you would want an apple to sing to you?
JOANNA CROSBY: I would be somewhat alarmed, I think, if I had a singing apple; but on the other hand I could be a hit on YouTube.
HZ: A very pragmatic attitude. I wonder if as you bite into the apple it starts to scream instead of sing.
JOANNA CROSBY: Yeah. That would not be good.
HZ: In the Celebrity episode, historian and writer and broadcaster Greg Jenner talked about the history of celebrity.
HZ: What are your feelings about couple portmanteaus - and also any idea when those erupted? Did Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks have Fairford or anything?
GREG JENNER: Roughly the right era. The earliest one I'm aware of is Cleo de Merode and Leopold of Belgium, King of Belgium. They were allegedly a couple, although she denied it, and they become Cleopold. And this was in the 1890s, Cleopold was Cleo plus Leo. ‘Cleopold’. Which is quite good. And in 1927, while making the film Flesh and the Devil, John Gilbert and Greta Garbo got together and it was pretty controversial because he was already married. But they ended up with a couple portmanteau name of Gilbo, which was not universally liked. And in fact, the Gilbo was a pejorative. They were booed really for their their sordid affair. So. So, yeah, Gilbo and Cleopod are the two earliest ones I'm aware of. And that's 100 years ago and 120 years ago.
HZ: Wow. So Brangelina were very late. Bennifer, way behind.
GREG JENNER: Exactly.
HZ: Maybe you associate the word ‘glamour’ with celebs? Well, get ready for some yikes:
GREG JENNER: ‘Glamour’ comes from a medieval Scottish word, meaning a book containing witchcraft, or occult, alchemy. So it comes from the Scottish word 'gramarye', and it was essentially a dictionary of spells. And what's interesting about glamour is that we now kind of use it to mean like anyone who just looks nice.
HZ: They've got a hairdo.
GREG JENNER: They've got a hairdo, they've done some lippy. But glamour, when it was first used in the film industry in the 1920s and 30s, particularly in the 30s, really: what people were meaning is a seductive visual spell. You're drinking the spell through your eyes and you are under the spell of this star. And you have to remember that cinema projected these images onto big screens. So these people were huge and you would be gazing into their faces, and the invention of the close-up is a hugely important moment. And so glamour was not just about people looking fancy. It was actually seduction.
HZ: But it also sounds like quite a negative thing, where you're saying to people: you're going to be seduced by this person, but it's unfair because they're using a supernatural tool that's at their disposal. And it's also kind of false.
GREG JENNER: Yeah. And you also had in the 19th century an obsession with charismatic leadership and people giving great speeches and orators. And this idea that you could influence a crowd, you could get a mob to change their mind by convincing them with specific gestures, specific language. There was one particular speech kind of therapist guy who developed a series of gestures and a series of sounds. And he practiced in his house for months on end, flailing his arms around and screaming and bellowing.
HZ: James Rush.
GREG JENNER: James Rush, thank you. These were taught to orators, to speakers. So James Rush taught people how to convince a crowd to get a mob onside by using these vocal and bodily pyrotechnics, if you will. So that's a technique. That's something you could learn. And, you know, we still see that now with modern politicians, the way they're taught to stand with their legs quite wide in a power stance, the way they're told not to point their fingers because it's aggressive, so they they put their thumb inside their fist: all this sort of body language tics and cues go back to the 19th century. So it's quite interesting to see the history of glamour as a kind of the idea of being manipulated: well, actually, that's older. The idea of manipulation goes back to the idea of mesmerism and magnetism and influential people in the 19th century who can change minds.
HZ: Mesmerism: eponym alert!
In the Celebrity episode, Greg talked about the religious etymology of words like fame and charisma. And here’s another one: fan.
GREG JENNER: The word ‘fan’ obviously has very strong religious connotations because it derives from fanaticus, which is Latin for relating to a shrine. And so fandom is a pretty modern word. I think fandom dates to very early 1900s and fan itself in the context we use. It dates to sort of late 1800s. And initially I think was used for baseball fans. So I think that starts with sports. So fans were people who liked baseball. But fanatic was used in the 17th century for people who were kind of religiously crazed and and over the top and you know we're not we're not praying to the right god or whatever. And fanaticus is ancient and speaks to shrines and religious behaviour. So someone who is a fan now is probably in no way thinking that they are doing anything religious and it's probably not at all a religious connotation for them. But the linguistic heritage does go very quickly, back to religious affairs, I suppose. And we get obviously fan culture that's now turned into stan culture and stanning. And that is not religious, but that's the idea of stan culture, is that it's an obsessive fandom, like it's over-the-top fandom, that you're too invested. You might end up doing something stupid or dangerous. And that's from Eminem's song, Stan, about a guy who goes too far. So it's quite fun actually that the history of fandom has gone through a few changes and iterations and linguistic leaps, but also its meaning seems to have changed, too.
HZ: With a lot of the words like ‘celebrity’, ‘fame’ a bit, and definitely ‘charisma’: there is a religious or divine link in a lot of the words.
GREG JENNER: And there is a longstanding... I mean, tradition is not the word really, but is a longstanding attempt to try and see if celebrity is some sort of religion replacement. You know, lots of sociologists in the 20th century said, "Well, look, clearly humans like worshipping stuff. If you travel around the world and visit various different communities in different parts of the world, or if you look in the ancient back to the Stone Age and whatever, we can always find some sort of religious behaviour. And clearly celebrity culture is just the latest in the form of religious behaviour. We're replacing God with photographs of Harry Styles." And as handsome as he is, I don't quite believe that. I'm not totally convinced by that. I think it's an interesting theory to its sort of chat about, but that feels to me a bit reductive. But the idea of religion as being something innately hardwired into us is also something that evolutionary psychologists talk about, the idea that we have an urge to worship. And so we can't help but do this, in the same way that sheepdogs, if you bring them indoors, will start herding furniture because they just "I've got to herd things! I've got to herd! What else you got? Chairs? That's fine, it doesn't need to be sheep." So, again, I'm not particular convinced of that, but I'm not an evolutionary psychologist. So what do I know? But from my point of view, I think there are definitely commonalities in the way that we gather as friends, as fans to congregate, to form a congregation. And we can certainly be reverential in touching relics, in collecting relics, you know, whether that's ticket stub stubs or whether that's ticket stubs or, you know, signed autographs, signed T-shirts, you know, the drummer's sticks that he's thrown from the front of the stage.
HZ: There was that person trying to sell Britney Spears’s fart in a jar. You can't even smell it unless you're willing to let it go forever.
GREG JENNER: Oh, that's amazing, isn't it? The idea that you want your one time sniff to to be a powerful. Did you wait for your deathbed? Is that the last thing you do?
HZ: Yeah. It just loses value immediately. But then you just have a jar of nothing. It's Shrodinger's fart.
HZ: In the episode Survival: Custodians of the Languages, Rudi Bremer talked about the many languages belonging to First Nations people of Australia.
RUDI BREMER: From an Aboriginal, or from an indigenous perspective, we refer to ourselves as ‘Black’, regardless of skin tone. It can throw people a little bit. And I'll be honest I don't entirely know where it came from. We also have - I use "white fullas" pretty, kind of, in a pretty particular wa, "white fulla" and "black fulla". But "gubba" is a word that gets used about white people, or to refer to white people, and it's one that you really only use if you don't like the person you're talking about. And somebody finally explained to me about ‘gubba’ is almost definitely sort of an Aboriginalisation of ‘governor’ or ‘government’. depending on where you think the word came from originally, but when you talk about someone being "a gub" or being "a gubba", like, it's not a nice thing. It's not something you want. You wouldn't describe your white friends as being "gubs". unless they really annoyed you.
HZ: Unless they'd come and taken your land and killed your people.
RUDI BREMER: Yeah! But, the way that we use "black", and "black fullas", and... Because we all say "fulla" as a gender neutral term. I think Australians have a tendency to use a lot of terms in a gender neutral way. We've taken the word "fireman" and turned it into "firies".
HZ: That works.
RUDI BREMER: In the same way that we've taken, like, "tradesmen" and we call them "tradies". We've just dropped "man" from a lot of things.
HZ: This is brilliant.
RUDI BREMER: We just sort of accidentally became really gender progressive in our language.
HZ: Just because everything sounds like a nickname.
RUDI BREMER: Yeah. Just because we're lazy.
HZ: Well that fixes some of the problems with gender in language I brought up in No Title.
On the New Rules episode, Gretchen McCulloch talked about how language develops online. There’s always some evolution that makes you wonder if everyone else met behind your back to decide how it works now.
GRETCHEN McCULLOCH: I've been doing some looking into email etiquette, because I have a lot of friends who are linguists and as I've aged, they've aged with me, and so now I have a lot of friends who are linguistics professors. And you get people periodically being like, “Oh my god, why can't my students send me an email? Why did they keep sending an e-mail like this?” I've been exposed to a lot of professors complaining about student email. And one of the things that at least the kind of professor generation - even though the professors I've known sometimes are like 30 - think is that emails should probably begin with ‘Dear’ or maybe ‘Hi’ but 'hey' is definitely too informal. And yet younger people that I've posed this question to are really against ‘dear’, because for them it actually feels like an endearment. It's like “My dearest Professor So-and-so”, “My darling Prof So-and-so”. That would be weird. And to a younger generation, at least some members of it, 'dear' is beginning to fall in that category where it seems uncomfortably literal now despite the fact that you know you went through this long period when it wasn't literal, of course it started out as literal; and it's regaining its literality as it becomes less common again.
HZ: That's so interesting. I mean, it is a weird one.
GRETCHEN McCULLOCH: It is a weird one. Why do we address perfect strangers as 'Dear sir'? You're not my darling! You're not my lover! You're not my family member! Dear sir or madam - who even are you? And yet I'm addressing you with this endearment. It's very strange.
HZ: Yeah, it's odd that such a warm words then became this very formal, almost froideur-laced term.
GRETCHEN McCULLOCH: Yeah, this semantically bleached word, the meaning just washes out because you use it so much. But then, if you aren't exposed to it in those formal contexts, you look at it and you're like, "Yep, I know what this word means. This is an endearment. I'm not using an endearment with my professor because that would be uncomfortably intimate and I'm not doing that." And so they don't think of it as a formality thing at all. It's like, this is something that's uncomfortable. Whereas if you say ‘hi’ or ‘hello’ or ‘hey’ or something, that's an acceptable greeting in person. Like you don't up to your professor in the hallway and say "dear Professor" or whatever, why would you do it in an email? Whereas you would say 'hi' to your professor in a hallway, so you could say that in email. At least this is this is the perspective that I'm getting from younger people.
HZ: And I was thinking, gosh, it's so difficult really to deduce well emotions or accompanying written words in the internet age, because the styles and indicators change pretty rapidly. But presumably that's the case in the history of writing. I could be interpreting things completely incorrectly for the emotion the writer intended and thought that they signposted, but I don't recognize the signposts of what they meant in 1800 and what not.
GRETCHEN McCULLOCH: There's this really interesting example of this from the musical Hamilton, where you have these two founding fathers Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr exchanging a series of letters which culminate in them fighting a duel. So this is an acrimonious exchange of letters. And yet they end all of the letters to each other as "your obedient servant". Clearly they don't mean that they are actually obedient or servants, because they end up fighting a duel; they're not pleasant letters, and yet they have these stylistic pleasantries that are just so conventional for the era as to be essentially meaningless that they're just using because that's what you do in a letter. And to the modern listener, to the modern reader, to Lin-Manuel Miranda writing Hamilton, this comes off as dramatic irony. So there's a song in Hamilton that has "your obedient servant" repeated in it about this acrimonious exchange, and the modern audience perceives irony there. But the historical audience wouldn’t have. So which of our things that seem just completely washed out and wrote formal politenesses will become literal again in another 200 years?
There's this stock phrase in French that you put at the end of business letters which is "Je vous assure, monsieur, l'expression de mes sentiments le plus distingués", which means something like "I assure you, sir, of my express the expression of my most distinguished sentiments" or something like this. It really doesn't have much meaning. It's just very formal, but that's just what you say; if you're writing a cover letter for your resumé, that's just what you say in French to convey 'this is the end of a formal letter'. And I remember trying to parse this as somebody learning French and just thinking "What on earth is this?" But of course if you're just exposed to it as that's what you say, it's a stock phrase, then you keep using it because everyone else is.
HZ: Yeah. That's that feedback loop again, isn't it? Presumably it's in letter writing guidelines, that that's what you do.
GRETCHEN McCULLOCH: Exactly; and if you don't do it that's a sign that you don't know what the expectations are. And so it's just it's self reinforcing. And you know like if you're going to have a formal contexts like a cover letter for a job application is one place to have a very formal contact like a resumé. It's a completely artificial document but it shows that you're fluent with a certain set of expectations. But there's space for lots of different styles, space for lots of different levels of formality when it comes to clothing or when it comes to food or when it comes to all of these other areas. So there can be space for these different types of styles when it comes to language.
HZ: This summer, on Blood Is Not Water, Anthony Russell, Arun Vishwanath, and Jonah Boyarin talked about translating ‘Black Lives Matter’ into Yiddish. Which was not Jonah’s first time translating protest slogans into Yiddish.
JONAH BOYARIN: When I was TAing at the Yiddish Book Centre last summer, there were protests in western Massachusetts as there were across the country against ICE or American immigration authorities, which are detaining in detention centres immigrant children and separating them from their families in a systematic and cruel way. And in particular, a lot of the protests last summer, a lot of them were led by Jewish organisations. It's an issue that for four different historical and immediate reasons are very close to a lot of Jewish people's hearts.
So one such action is being organised in western Massachusetts during this summer Yiddish program, and I organised a group of faculty and students to go. And as we were preparing, all the students who are in this immersive Yiddish experience were saying, “What kind of signs do we write?” When you're a beginner or intermediate student and you're going through every day in your dorm and like learning how to say, you know, "I boiled the rice" in Yiddish or "pass the pepper" in Yiddish, you're also going to want to say, you know, "a world without borders” in Yiddish. And I was fielding a lot of these questions as a TA.
And as part of that process, their questions prompted me to come up with a slogan at the time, which was "Aoys ICE," which means "Out with ICE" or "Down with ICE", which I had come up with because I had read or reread for the third or fourth time that very summer Sholem Aleichem, the great Yiddish writer's story called ‘Kappores’, Chicken, something like that. At any rate, it's a story about a group of chickens who in their local shtetl go on strike against the tradition of being sacrificed each year during the high holidays to expiate the local townspeople's sins. And as they go on strike, they march around saying, "Aoys kappores, aoys kappores". So I said, "You know what, I think I know how to say in Yiddish - I've never been to a Yiddish-speaking protest in my life. I've been to a million protests, I've never been in Yiddish speaking protest. But from the Sholem Aleichem story, I'm inferring that you can say ‘Aoys X,’ you know, out with X." So I said Aoys ICE, that works.
So I came up with that, and we fashioned signs accordingly. I sent to some friends who were organising Never Again actions in DC and elsewhere, and sashes were made with these words on them and corresponding words in English and Spanish. I got a little bit of pushback from one of my colleagues who said, "Actually it should be Aoys Mit ICE, down with ICE." And I said, "Here's how I know why it is ‘Aoys ICE’, because it's in the Sholem Aleichem story."
And we had a really beautiful experience going to the protest, participating as everyone else did, singing everyone's chants and also holding up our signs in Yiddish and being in that tradition. And I also tell the story to say these things were generated quite consciously. I had to learn, or infer, how to write a snappy Yiddish protest sign or slogan from an 100-year-old Yiddish story. And the reason that I have to infer that is because the chain of Yiddish transmission has been cut by coerced and incentivised assimilation, being disassociated both from our own tongues, our own our own Yiddish tongues, and also from our more radical roots.
ANTHONY RUSSELL: I love the fact that Aoys ICE came from chickens who were protesting. That the beginnings of a vocabulary for Yiddish protest took place in the farmyard of a shtetl far away from here - my mind is blown. I'm literally gonna - as soon as we get off of this, I'm going to talk to my husband about it for at least an hour.
JONAH BOYARIN: We're constantly working to sort of demonstrate to ourselves that life can be lived in this language, and that Sholem Aleichem's story about the chickens striking, which is another way of saying, well, really, he was drawing on stories of the proletariat going on mass strikes, that that's relevant history now, in some way that we can draw on it now.
ARUN VISWANATH: Because of the way in which the use of Yiddish has eroded in uneven ways across the Ashkenazi Jewish community, people have linguistic intuitions about Yiddish that they feel very, very strongly about. And some of those people may be native speakers who have different intuitions than my own intuitions or somebody else's. And some of them may not be native Yiddish speakers and may have intuitions about Yiddish that they are very, very sure about, which I think creates some interesting challenges.
ANTHONY RUSSELL: Yiddish as a language has this sort of like totemic quality where people want to know what certain things in that language sound like because it connects them to certain parts of themselves. It connects them with an amazing sort of history. Basically, the communities of Yiddish are shaped, oddly enough, like a bagel. And there's like nothing in the middle. So you have to inhabit the middle in order to connect with the rest of the parts of the bagel.
ARUN VISWANATH: I'm hungry now!
JONAH BOYARIN: That metaphor could use some sesame seeds, and poppy seeds, and onion pieces on top...
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
patulous, adj, rare: spreading wide, like the branches of a tree.
Ah, that’s a nice one to end the year on. Thanks dictionary. Try using ‘patulous’ in an email today.
Thanks for your support this year, listening to episodes and snoozing to the Tranquillusionists, and becoming patrons on Patreon as the show became independent.
The show will return with new episodes towards the end of January 2021, but, boring warning: the feed is about to change, so hopefully it’ll go smoothly and you’ll not notice a thing. But if it gets to, say, mid-February, and you don’t have new Allusionist episodes in your podfeed, then try unsubscribing and resubscribing, or searching for the show in whatever app you use to listen to podcasts. And if in doubt, you can always find the show, and transcripts, and the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
