Listen to this episode at theallusionist.org/bonus2021
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, leave a carrot by the chimney for language.
Thanks to Ashra by the way for another year of collecting what are known in the Allusioverse as inwhiches and illustrating each with a carefully chosen gif - see that at inwhiches.tumblr.com. I’m sure future generations will be studying it avidly, for clues to the meaning of life.
Today’s episode is our annual lucky dip of bonus bits, which I’ve been saving all year, because often Allusionist guests say too many interesting things to fit into one episode, or interesting things that aren’t about language. So I stashed these things away until now. There have been lots of very fine episodes this year too for you to catch up on. We’ve had the surprising history of dude, and zero and other numbers, and hedge witches; we heard from the inventor of the portmanteau ‘misogynoir’; we heard about language for asexuality and aromanticism, for trans parenthood, for disability and bereavement and mental health; we learned how Icelandic is handling the 21st century; we heard about cakes and recipes as forms of protest; we started the year with analysis of apologies, that episode has been very useful - if you know any celebrities, send it to them juuuust in case, because they will probably end up needing it.
On with the bonus bits of 2021.
HZ: This year you tested your food etymology knowledge in the playalong Food Quiz with Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway - and we landed on a provocative subject!
HZ: Define a salad.
SAMIN NOSRAT: It's some stuff with a dressing on it.
HZ: So dressing is a critical part to you.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Er, yes!
HZ: I prefer my salads nude. Not all of them - not, like, potato salad - but generally, if it's just a fairly vegetabley salad then yes.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Wait, you want it - wait a minute -
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: How about a fruit salad? There's no dressing on a fruit salad.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Yeah, of course there is. Okay, first of all, explain to me a nude - we just like glossed over Helen's nude vegetable salad. That's just a bowl of vegetables. That's a bowl...
HZ: Yes. Chopped up things.
SAMIN NOSRAT: That's just a bowl of vegetables. That's not a salad.
HZ: How's it not a salad? What is a salad? Hrishi, what's a salad? It's a nightmare word to define.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah. Salad...
SAMIN NOSRAT: No, I just defined it. It is some stuff with some dressing on it. Out of the three of us, only one of us is a chef and a restaurant person and an actual cook who's written a cookbook.
HZ: You have, it's true. But I've eaten a salad with my own mouth that's undressed, so that's the proof in the opposite direction. It can happen. But do you have criteria for what the dressing has to appear on? Because you couldn't just pour dressing over like one whole potato and call that a salad, right? That would be one potato with dressing.
SAMIN NOSRAT: That would just be a dressed potato.
HZ: So where does the saladness -
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah, I think salad needs some element of mishmash.
HZ: Yeah, choppage.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Or just combination.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Pieces.
HZ: Pieces + dressing = salad.
SAMIN NOSRAT: But the pieces could be of the same ilk.
HZ: Yeah. Like one kind of lettuce?
SAMIN NOSRAT: Or all the same kind of tomato, or all the same kind of cucumber. Also, back to the fruit salad question. Often fruit salad has a little sugar and or lemon juice, which constitutes a dressing.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Would you say that is the ideal version of a fruit salad? I mean, platonic ideal? Because that sounds like an exception to what I imagined fruit salad is.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Are you talking about like a fruit cocktail from a can?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: No, I'm talking about fruit salad. I'm talking about you know, it's Sunday brunch and along with the omelette and hash browns, you get some fruit salad and it's just, you know, blackberries, raspberries, some honeydew that nobody wants, and some sad grapes. That’s a fruit salad.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Like a whole bunch of dry fruit in a bowl.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Not dried fruit. Fresh.
SAMIN NOSRAT: No, not dried, dry.
HZ: Nude! Nude fruit.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Nude fruit.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: But there's no there's no dressing.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Yeah, that's a sad situation. That's to me, like, cut up fruit in a bowl.
HZ: Samin is a Never Nude for salads.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Correct.
HZ: Salad is difficult to define - you try it, any definition you can come up with, there’ll be a salad to contradict it.
Also perplexing are ladybirds/ladybugs, neither ladies nor birds nor bugs. But they are very interesting and ingenious creatures. Here’s Tamsin Majerus AKA Dr Ladybird to talk about some of their many powers.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Most ladybirds, you're probably aware of, have spots. So that's, you know, if you asked anybody, they'd say, oh yeah, the ladybirds have spots. There are ladybirds that have stripes, and there is an originally named striped ladybird, which has whitish stripes on an orange, a paler orange background. And they are warningly coloured when they sit on pine trees, which is where they live. So they stand out against the pine needles very clearly, they're very obvious, and that will scare off the predators. But they can also blend in with the pine buds. So if they nestle in with the pine buds, they're beautifully camouflaged. And they sit head in to the pine bud, so the shape is right as well. You get the end of their abdomen sticking out where the pine buds are pointing out. Sothey do a kind of double thing.
And there's another species that does something similar: the water ladybird has two very distinct patterns at different times of the year. So in the summer when they're active, they are bright pink with brownish spots, and in the winter, all the reeds that they would normally live on, which normally in the summer are green, the reeds go brown, and then maybe have a little bit of mold or something on them so they have some black dots, and the ladybirds become brown with black spots. And so they blend in and so they can be camouflaged during the winter when they're not so active and mobile, and they don't want anyone to bother them.
HZ: How do they switch that on?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Just very clever. One of the things we don't know, although we're beginning to learn, is how they switch the colours on and off. There's clear, quite simple genetic control on, on many of the things. So we can look at inheritance of the colours and we can see, you know, if you cross two two-spots that are both red with black spots, you'll get red with black spots offspring, more or less.
HZ: I suppose some of us might be surprised to hear that a lot of it is for camouflage, considering ladybirds are such a distinctive looking insect when we do see them, so they stand out quite conspicuously in some contexts.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Yes. And I think, I think that's the, that's probably the main mode of operation, if that makes sense. There's also obviously recognition, mate recognition. Some of that is done with pheromones, so things you can't see, but you can smell. But other things, there seem to be particular meeting preferences. So where you have a species, like the two-spot has the common form that everybody would recognize with two black spots on a red background: it also has a kind of reverse form where you have red spots on a black background. And it seems that some of the female ladybirds will prefer to mate with males that have that black - the melanic, as we call it - colour pattern. And that seems to be genetically controlled, seems to be a single gene that controls it. So the colour patterns can be very important in that, that mate recognition as well.
HZ: I don't want to seem like too much of a ladybird sex pervert, but could, say, a two spot ladybird mate, with one, the ones that is yellow with lots of spots?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: They will primarily only mate with their own species , but that within a species, all the variants will make with each other. You do get matings between different species, particularly if they're closely related; so two spots and 10 spots, which are two of of our British species, they're different species, but they're the same genus, but they will mate with each other , and they will they'll produce offspring, but the offspring are sterile. So they can make viable offspring, but then those offspring can't go on to make more. That's just about genetic differences that mean that it'll kind of work once, but then it, it can't deal with another generation of trying to do the same thing.
HZ: There are several versions of the nursery rhyme that begins “Ladybird, ladybird fly away home,” next line usually involves something horrific happening to the ladybird’s children. After all the help they provide, why do ladybirds have such a bad time in poetry?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: I think the suggestion there is maybe that came from the people who used to go travel from London to Kent to help with farming for gathering at the end of the season. And they would say it to the ladybirds, because obviously when they cut all the crops, they would, then when they'd harvest the crops, they'd burn the stubble. And so the reference to fire is about the, the farmers burning, which would obviously kill the ladybirds and destroy their homes. And so they needed to get away quick.
Where could they go? What could they go in can,
Well, it's, I don't know. It's difficult to get into the shrubbery.
HZ: right. Yeah. Just go for the ornamental plants
TAMSIN MAJERUS: I just had you surrounding the fields maybe?
Yeah. The other, the other rhymes are about, um, sort of more romantic. So again, maybe feeding back into this sort of fertility theme that, that, you know, you, you, the ladybird flies away towards your true love, um, in some way. And so they, they, um, they call upon the ladybirds of flight.
That sweetheart. And, and the word ladybird, obviously Romeo and Juliet. Um, there's a, there's a little quote from Romeo and Juliet. What, what love, what ladybird. Yeah, what Juliette's exactly. So, um, so again, it, I guess it means sweetheart in that context.
HZ: Not so romantic, although still very evocative, is a ladybird ability known as male killing. Yes, this is what it sounds like.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Male killing is caused by bacteria that live in the female ladybird, and they get into her ovaries and, and into the eggs that she produces and somehow, and we don't really know how, they kill off the embryos that are destined to become male. So when she lays her clutch of eggs, normally we expect half of those will end up being female ladybirds, the other half will be male ladybirds; but a female ladybird that has a male killer will often have a clutch of eggs where only about half of them hatch and the whole for hatch go on to become feat. So the males were killed right at the very beginning of their lifetime. it works surprisingly because the female larvae and something, which is slightly disgusting as they emerge from the egg, they need to eat something very quickly or they'll starve to death.They've got male eggs right there that aren't hatching into larvae. They eat those eggs. So they eat their dead brothers, nasty little bit of cannibalism, but -
HZ: Well, it’s pragmatic cannibalism.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Yeah, exactly. They’re off to a big advantage compared to females in a clutch where everything hatched and there wasn't anything to eat.
HZ: I’m sure this is a metaphor for something.
Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir came on the Allusionist to talk about the Icelandic language’s moves to include more queer and genderfree vocabulary, and how that is challenging because the whole language is grammatically gendered.
HZ: Can you have a genderfree grandparent?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: We could say… no, we don't, we don't. We need one. We have amma for grandmother, and afi. We just have amma and afi, I don't even think we have grandparents. Now I'm suddenly like, am I wrong? But I don't think we do. We would just have to say amma og afi.
HZ: What we don't have in English is a genderfree word for aunt or uncle. We do have grandparents and parents and siblings, but not that.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Yeah, we don't have that either. We have frænka for a female relative, or female a-bit-more-distant-relative than the close family, and then we have frændi, the male more-distant-relative. And that's another word we need for non binary people. We need a third term there as well. Some people have been using frænk, where they take the feminine term and take the ending away, so that's one way of doing it. But we don't have a distinction between aunt and uncle and niece and nephew and cousin, it’s all frændi, frænka. So we, this is a problem for us when we learn English, we need to figure out all of these relationships and how people are related to each other.
HZ: No one really understands cousins.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: But the word frændi, that means male distant relative or not really distant, but cousin, uncle, so on: it's related to friend. It is the same word basically. So that's cute.
HZ: Paul Tyreman of PK Porthcurno, the Museum of Global Communications, came on the show to talk about SOS, the breakout star of Morse code.
HZ: Why do you think Morse code became prevalent?
PAUL TYREMAN: It's probably simplicity really, it's such a simple thing to use and learn that it became the standard way of doing it. Morse code became prevalent before radio, when the telegraph is still on wires. Over at PK, we have loads of systems that people developed in the early days of the telegraph to read the signals at the other end. As things got further and further away, you needed much more sensitive instruments to detect things. So you ended up with a very sensitive galvanometer which measures tiny, tiny electrical currents, and it would go one way or the other. Because these old ones move so slowly, the cable code became - it was exactly Morse code, except instead of dot and dash, it went left and right. That led to all kinds of useful things. So you could get automation: you would send it to a kind of siphon recorder, so a paper strip would be pulled through this machine and a little siphon in a pot of ink would be putting down on a page, and as it moved left and right, then the trace on the piece of paper moved left and right. And experienced operators could read that. But it gave a permanent record of the signal that had gone.
HZ: There have also been similar systems involving holes being punched into paper strips.
PAUL TYREMAN: So the paper will be pulled through the machine and it would punch holes left and right for the dashes and the dots of the Morse code. That could be automated then; so somebody could type just on a typewriter keyboard, that would punch the correct holes for the letters, and then the tape would go through a machine which would send the Morse code faster than somebody could tap it out. And then at the other end, another machine could punch a new tape for somebody to read there.
HZ: During the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, cables were laid under the sea to create a worldwide telegraphy network, allowing words to travel between continents in the same day. But over the really long stretches of cable, the signal would get very weak, so you couldn’t send a signal over a long distance in one go, for instance from Australia to Britain. Therefore tiny islands in the middle of the ocean suddenly became very useful to telegraphy companies, so they could plonk relay stations on them.
PAUL TYREMAN: There were all kinds of stations at places like Ascension Island. And so you'd have people there who would read the message coming in, write it down, and then send it out again. And by the 1920s, with this punch paper tape, they'd invented a system called Regen, which regenerated the signal without any human intervention. It was all based on clockwork, clocks for timing, electromechanical switches and motors to keep everything running, and completely automatic. So the staff on those little cable stations then got a lot smaller. You just needed somebody to keep everything running, and no one to write the messages down and send them again. So one story we tell the children that come out to PK is that life on those stations changed, because instead of playing football and cricket with a team of people, you'd be playing tennis with your whole staff, because there weren't enough there for team sports.
HZ: Or just hitting a ball against a wall on your own.
PAUL TYREMAN: Yeah.
HZ: It is amazing though; it still seems extremely impressive.
PAUL TYREMAN: It is. I mean, we've still got a similar kind of thing even with fibre optics because even the light signal gets weakened on the way through the cables, through the fibres. So underneath the ocean, there are things about the size of a cow which boosts the light signal and get it bright enough for the next stage of the cable.
HZ: And now I have a mental imagine of cows strolling around on the ocean floor beaming light around. Not complaining; it’s nice.
Finally, talking about a different kind of signal is Madi Lang of BA Concierge in Buenos Aires, who appeared before to tell us about the cake names of Argentina which arose from protest in 1888 and are still in use today. Here she talks about another form of protest, cacerolazo, which involves banging your pots and pans. Cacerolazo has been used a lot in South American countries but also across the world, this very year people in Myanmar protested the military coup with cacerolazo at 8pm.
MADI LANG: When the protests here started, they actually began - everything kind of does revolve around food. It began with, I believe, the conventillos; these were like these big old mansions that, once the rich people moved north to the greener pastures, all the immigrants moved into these big mansions, so instead of a single family home it would be like a hundred family home, and there was maybe one bathroom and the rent was really high, and so these conditions were really bad. And it was actually the grandmas and the moms that would grab their pots and pans and bang, and that's how the protests began. And they called it "cacerolazo". Basically like "the big casserole... do". And to this day, every once in a while, the city or the social networks will plan a cacerolazo, or just,before social media was just the neighbours or the newspapers, and if you really care about whatever you're protesting against, which is usually the government, you can go to a big street corner - and everybody knows the main corners of the city where they do this - or you just go out on your balcony at 9pm on whatever day, and you bang your pots and pans. For me, I love it, because it's just this real thing that happens without computers, without telephones. But it's the pots and pans, because these are these basic things that you have to make noise.
HZ: Like with the cake names, you make your point with whatever resources you’ve got.
The Allusionist is an independent podcast, and I love to be in league with other independent podcasts, independenting together. In the Podlingual episode this year I was joined by two independent podcasters, James Kim and Lory Martinez, who were talking about making multilingual podcasts. So I thought I’d tell you about Lory’s company Studio Ochenta’s new show called Caper: it’s a true crime show about some of the most famous heists in history, like the theft of the Mona Lisa or Edvard Munch’s Scream. The show is available in English, Spanish, German and Italian! So and go and get Caper for free from the pod places or at ochentastudio.com.
It’s been a very different year for the Allusionist and huge thanks to you for listening, and telling people about the show, and supporting emotionally and financially at patreon.com/allusionist. The podcast will return in February 2022, but in January, patrons will be getting livestreams. I had better tidy up my flat. Or put up a backdrop of a tidy person’s flat. Join us for those and hang out with your fellow patreons at patreon.com/allusionist.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
nootropic, adj: denoting drugs used to enhance memory or other cognitive functions.
Try using ‘nootropic’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman; the music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor an episode of the show in 2022, contact them at multitude.productions/ads. Thanks Amanda and Carly at Multitude for all your work for the show this year!
Keep in touch, find @allusionistshow on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. And to hear or read every episode of the show, get links to more information about topics therein, obtain merch such as the Potato Fugue State sweatshirts, see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words and browse a lexicon of every word ever covered in the show to listen to the episode about it, visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
