Go to theallusionist.org/bonus2022 to listen to this episode and find links to all the guests plus more information about the topics
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, over the year 2022, have brought you the surprisingly long history of the name Tiffany, the surprisingly short history of Fiona; we considered the lexicons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and golden age detective fiction; we met the protest vote rhinoceros, and there was a quiz all about animal etymologies; we dug into the terms ‘rainbow-washing’, and ‘queerbaiting’, and ‘bork’; and we went deep into the multilingual warning message inside a Kinder Surprise egg.
And now: I’ve been saving things up all year and now it’s time to smash open the piggy bank to play the annual parade of bonus bits! These are interesting things this year’s interviewees said that I didn’t include because the episode was too long or on a different topic, but now here they are.
Content note: there are some allusions to bawdy talk, and there is one category A swear; there are discussions of mental health; and a brief reference to parental violence.
On with the show.
HZ: In the In Character episode, Jing Tsu talked about how Chinese writing systems dealt with the challenges of new technologies like telegraphy being designed for European writing systems. One of the things Jing Tsu mentions in her book Kingdom of Characters is Nüshu, a writing system used only by women in one region of the province of Hunan.
JING TSU: Nüshu is basically women's script, and it's developed kind of like an informal writing for women, who otherwise had no access to education in a society, traditional society. My favorite thing about that script is it's slender, it's thinner than what you see in character, but these are these individual markings, and there's a lot of crisscrossing patterns. And it's because they're used to approximate patterns that women see when they do embroidery. So it's just an incredible relationship or reflection on their social condition that's reflected back in the very writing system that they built for themselves.
HZ: In that In Character episode, Jing Tsu talked about how Chinese language contains many homophones and how these present a lot of difficulty to anyone trying to transcribe Chinese into the Roman alphabet. But a currently very handy function of homophones is that they can be used to say things that would otherwise be censored. Ingenious!
JING TSU: Yes. Isn't it? There's so many inventors in Chinese culture and linguistic context. Some of it really is impossible to translate, but it's true: homophones are a fabulous way of saying what you're not supposed to say. For instance, there's the larger rubric for describing these kind of internet, anti-authoritarian or evasive slangs, is actually called cǎonímǎ, which is actually a "grass mud horse".
HZ: Of course!
JING TSU: But those three put together is actually to approximate the homophones for "screw your mother". So it's not coincidental that is used to describe - what would you call it? Like kind of underground use of Chinese characters to escape authoritarian control?
HZ: Incredible.
JING TSU: Language games are almost like instinctive for any Chinese speaker. There's just endless word plays in Chinese language, it is quite remarkable.
HZ: Morénike Giwa Onaiwu appeared on the episode about moving from the term ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’, and we discussed the vocabulary around autism. I asked her how she feels about the term ‘neurodiversity’.
MORÉNIKE GIWA ONAIWU: My thoughts on this are evolving. Initially, before maybe a year, a couple of years ago, I would have said that it's a term that I love and I think is important. And I do use it quite a bit. Neuro diversity is the term that was really meaningful to me when I first learned of it. And its similarity to bio-diversity and I feel like there's a lot of really profound concepts within it. But I do understand that there's nuances and there's complexities and I have noticed that it's been co-opted. And so I have concerns about how it's meant. To a lot of people it's another code word for autism, or autism and ADHD. It includes so much more than that. Like neurodiversity is a fact of life. No human beings have the same brain. Neurodiversity overall collectively includes those with more neurotypical presentations or non autistic, non ADHD, non dyslexic, you know what have you. Judy Singer created neurodiversity and she has kind of clarified what she meant, versus what it's kind of come to mean colloquially.
HZ: Australian sociologist Judy Singer came up with the term ‘neurodiversity’ in her thesis which she published in 1998. Judy Singer offered neurodiversity as a term for a civil rights movement: neurodiversity is not supposed to be a diagnosis, it’s meant to be a term to analyse inequality and abuse, and a term for activism for people who are marginalised on grounds of neurology. She has also used ‘biodiversity’ as a comparison, explaining: “Diversity is a measurement of the degree of variability of a given variable in a given population or place. It is NOT a characteristic of the individuals in that population.”
MORÉNIKE GIWA ONAIWU: And I also don't like that neurodiversity has come to mean, "Oh, this is a buzzword that I can use so I can throw it on top of an employment program, or put some colourful brains, or try to get some programmers." In some cases, when people are talking about neurodiversity, they expect it to present a particular way. It can be used for exclusion, even though that's not at all what it's intended to be used for. I've seen neuro-diversity type of language or affirming language for people to describe things that are, you know, like segregated work, shelters and housing programs. And so it's very tricky, using language that's supposed to be liberatory to convey a meaning that's anything but.
HZ: That happens an awful lot.
MORÉNIKE GIWA ONAIWU: Unfortunately, yeah.
HZ: And also just these euphemisms where it's not like anything under the surface has changed; people haven't adjusted their language because they have considered how accommodations can be made for different people's needs.
MORÉNIKE GIWA ONAIWU: Yeah, they're just, "Oh, I'm supposed to say this now." It's just the substitution. It's not even really a paradigm shift for a lot of people at all. And that's sad.
HZ: Are there any other terms you'd like people to add to their vocabularies for talking about autism?
MORÉNIKE GIWA ONAIWU: Sure. And they might already have them. There's the term allistic, which means non-autistic. Years ago, when I first heard that, I was like, "That sounds so ridiculous." But the reason why, so I might use allistic or non-autistic, but what I don't want people to do with people have started to use neurotypical to mean non-autistic, and that is not true. A person might be non-autistic, but they could have dyscalculia orwhatever. So they're not necessarily ‘neurotypical’.
HZ: Who decided typical? The committee?
MORÉNIKE GIWA ONAIWU: Exactly! So I feel like people should be more precise in what they mean. And I also prefer for people to use descriptive terms, as opposed to functioning labels - you know, profound autism, severe autism, mild autism, high functioning, low functioning; anything that's gonna make a person feel bad. Like what's the opposite of high? It's low. Who wants to be low? I think that people should describe things in a way to where you know what's happening, and you're not going to be made to feel any particular way, elevated or lowered.
HZ: Speaking of 'neuro-', here's the word's etymology with Tim Clare, who appeared on the Coward episode.
HZ: I've just learned the etymology of neuro: that came from the Greek 'nerve', but before that was sinew, but also a sinew as in like a bow string or an instrument string, or a penis.
TIM CLARE: Those seem like quite radically different things, a bow string and a penis, I like to think.
HZ: One hopes.
HZ: Tim and I discussed some other brain etymology, like ‘hippocampus’.
TIM CLARE: So, oh gosh, I love that word. The brain's quite a tricky one, because you'll get lots of hypo, like you'll get the hypothalamus. Now that of course means ‘under’; that's the other term. And so I'm often calling it the hyperthalamus, but it's the hypothalamus meaning 'under the thalamus'. But hippocampus, meaning horse, because it looks like a a sea horse, right? …Oh, don't look at them! They look absolutely terrifying!
HZ: I've never seen a hippocampus, so I don't know.
TIM CLARE: There is a real David Cronenberg-like element to them. I guess the hippocampus came first. So much of the brain is kind of lovely because just the first time someone took that piece of the brain out, they thought, "Ah, this looks a bit like a belt! Or a girdle! I'm gonna name this after the belt. This looks a bit like a seahorse, I'm gonna call it the hippocampus." The amygdala, from amygdalon meaning ‘almond’. I suppose it's almond-shaped.
HZ: Amygdala was also the Latin for ‘tonsil’, and other languages still call tonsils ‘almonds’. TIM CLARE: Really? Wow! I guess they are like almonds as well.
HZ: Everything looking like almonds. I suppose it is quite a general shape.
TIM CLARE: Yeah.
HZ: In the episode Coward, Tim Clare and I talked about anxiety, and cowardice, and I brought up the etymology of ‘worry’.
HZ: It was originally ‘strangle’ or ‘kill by biting the throat’. Which we kind of have as still like dogs worrying cattle. But it was only relatively late in 1800s that it meant to trouble someone, or for someone to feel troubled.
TIM CLARE: We still have that sense of worrying as being a kind of gnawing, or a terrier worrying at a rat's throat or something like that. And it's a lovely metaphor, isn't it? Because it, it speaks so much to what we do when we worry, which is to gnaw at a problem over and over to try and wear it down. And the sense that worrying is an active process, that it's still a verb - anxiety is a state, isn't it, or a diagnosis or a condition; worrying is active. And there's often built into that this implication that if I just worry at this enough, I might solve it. I might be able to fix the problem. I might be able to find a new solution.
HZ: It's an expression of care in some cases.
TIM CLARE: Yes. Yes? And yet I think there's also that violence tied up in it as well. And I don't mean - I worry about my daughter, so I'm not meaning to malign people who worry about their children: I worry about all the people I love; I worry about the future of the world. But there's something, I think, destructive about it as well. There's something harmful. There's something painful. There's something bloody. I think the etymology of it implies how I feel about it, that it's ultimately a futile and painful and destructive process.
HZ: Stephanie Foo came on the show to talk about complex post traumatic stress disorder; this year she published a book, What My Bones Know, in which she recounts the experiences she had had in being diagnosed and treated for the condition. There was one therapist with whom Stephanie had a breakthrough.
HZ: You talk about working with a therapist where, after you've had your sessions in person, you studied the transcripts. What was it about seeing the words written down that helped you more than just speaking with the therapist?
STEPHANIE FOO: I was sort of able to dissociate. Look, I don't think everyone could be able to do this, but I'm very used to looking at a Google doc and editing it. So being able to have it on the page: first of all, I couldn't argue with it. I couldn't say like, "No, I wasn't triggered right then. No, you're misinterpreting it." It's right there. Like I have the recording. I have the transcript. I did it. There's no getting around it. Number two: yeah, I was sort of able to shift from “Oh my God, you're criticizing me” mode into like “we're editing this together” mode. “Here we are in front of the script. We want it to be the best we can. And let's just make little notes everywhere.” And my therapist was also great at just making me feel really safe and cared for, and he built a really safe environment where, you know, if there was somewhere in the session where I highlighted it and I was like, "you're being kind of a dick here," he'd be like, “Oh, absolutely.” And he would do that himself. He would be like, “Look, I'm pushing you way too hard here. Like, this is not okay.” He was the first to criticize himself and really look at his own failings in the conversation. But as well as saying, like, "What's going on with you here? You're ranting on and on about nothing."
And I would notice it too. I'm like you, you can see it on the page, like why is there half of a page or two pages of me ranting about nothing? And then we would scroll up. And right before this long rant, I was like talking about my mom holding a knife to my throat. And I was like, "Aha, I see," he's like, "Yeah, you dissociated in order to tell this story. And you disappeared and you just got lost on the way, because you were dissociated or you weren't in your body, you weren't really conscious of what you were talking about." I was like, “Yeah. That's very real.” And it didn't make me feel like I was, that was my fault, you know, like it was a broken thing to do; it just helped me understand. I see why I did that. I understand it. Like I can go back and engage with that differently next time maybe. If I start to feel myself talking for a long time, just take a step back, question, like, “Hey, might I be triggered right now? Maybe I need to slow down.”
HZ: In the Objectivity episode, Lewis Raven Wallace talked about what objectivity is supposed to mean, what it tends to mean in practice, and the failings of the concept.
HZ: When you were working in public media, were there words or constructions that you were supposed to avoid in the interests of so-called objectivity?
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: There were so many words and constructions. I remember, early in my first year, I referred to a source as 'anti-gay'. I would still refer to that source as anti-gay, if I were asked today. It was like a conservative activist of some kind who was advocating pretty fiercely against queer and trans children having rights. But the word 'anti-gay': my editor was like, "That seems biased, it seems like you're expressing an opinion about that person's opinions." I know; mind blown. I can't remember now what we changed it to, but it was like instead of saying an anti-gay activist, it was like "an activist who opposes gay marriage" or something like that.
HZ: Well, that’s a lot of words.
LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE: So like these clunky, ungraceful ways that we try to avoid terminology that might seem biased from some perspective. So I was just very confused by that. I think more recently there have been more pronounced and prominent examples of that kind of weird censorship, like not being able to call Donald Trump a racist or not being able to call white supremacist activists 'white supremacists'.
The whole debate over how to refer to undocumented immigrants is one, that definitely has played out in many newsrooms, that editors have said, "‘Undocumented’ as a sort of activist terminology. That's what they want to be called, but we're going to continue to refer to them as 'illegal'." Which, of course, calling a person illegal has a ton of implicit bias in it as to what you think about that person's actions that they took to survive. And ‘undocumented’ as terminology was proposed to push back against that and to reduce the amount of bias against undocumented immigrants and the way that they're perceived and the way that their stories and reasons for being in this country are perceived.
HZ: You can hear more about the language used for migration in the Away Team episode of the show from a few years ago. On the topic of bias and objectivity or impossibility thereof, here’s historian Charlotte Lydia Riley, who appeared in the Emergency episode about the Malayan Emergency, the twelve-year military conflict that Britain refused to call a war.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: All historians are subjective. All history is subjective. There's no objective historian. Even if you're writing about the Tudors or ancient Greece, there's no objective historian, right?
HZ: Yeah. I think there is often a presumption that the recording of history is neutral, and of course it isn't, and the terminology isn't; it's very loaded.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: Absolutely. And what's happening now actually is that historians like me, and other historians who are being critical of empire, say: we are being accused of subjectivity against what is assumed to be an objective historical record. So we are accused of being politically motivated. We are accused of being in hock to the values of our time; we are accused of being motivated by our own beliefs and feelings about empire, as if that wasn't also the case for the people who originally wrote these histories, and as if that wasn't the case for the people who want to defend Empire as well. The people who are defensive of the sort of very traditional historical record about empire are just as subjective as we are.
But it's become a way for them to really criticize this rewriting, and much more, actually, when it's aimed at kind of people of colour, and historians of colour: they are always being told they can't possibly be objective about this, or they are definitely politically motivated or they're motivated by their own experiences - as if all historians weren't, as if everyone wasn't in the same boat. And it's not just the kind of culture wars-y thing that's coming from ordinary people; it's actually government ministers are telling people that they're doing the wrong sort of history. The education secretary stood up at the conservative conference this year and said that people were teaching anti British history in schools and universities. Which is sort of funny, and sort of is probably going to get someone killed.
HZ: It seems really terrible.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: It does feel like this has really happened recently. At the start of my career, it was hard to get anyone interested in Empire; and I haven't been a historian for that long. It was difficult to get people to take British Empire seriously, or to think about it really at all. It was all the Second World War, and the Tudors. And now, Empire is everywhere and it is something that has become hugely emotionalized. All history is political, but this has become a real political football. And it is interesting, because I think there was a lot of kind of gentle critique of empire happening for quite a long time. And now it's very difficult to get that stuff written down.
And then you have things like the History Reclaimed project, they're kind of fighting against this idea of sort of political correctness or whatever, and they want people to send in examples of things like museum exhibits and statues and events that have been tempered or had extra description added or been kind of worked on by historians to make them more critical of imperialism. So even 'retain and explain', which is supposedly the government policy on imperialism: even that's now coming under criticism. They're not actually that keen on the explaining element of that.
HZ: Oh, no. I think it would be very hard for them to do to do that and get the other things to hold up. That's the trouble with the truth. It looks bad.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: When it was bad, it is bad, right? It's quite difficult to find yourself constantly labelled anti British when actually what you're doing is just writing banal things that happened. You can get labelled anti-British, as a historian, really for not being particularly critical. You actually don't have to be that out there to be seen as a kind of anti-British activist.
HZ: Ah, the fragility!
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: Mm-hmm.
HZ: It seems also a bit inconsistent that - or maybe it's because like you've got several generations of people now who were too young to have lived through the times when a lot of these conflicts were happening, but also weren't educated about them because, at school, history, we weren't taught about anything that recent. And then the empire's just like this kind of thing where you can have a mindset that it's sort of in the past, or was gently a good thing; and then you get quite animated preserving it against criticism and whatnot.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: It is quite strange. It's funny to think about it in tandem with the second world war actually, because a lot of people talk about the Second World War as if they were there. And the number of people in Britain who have any direct experience with the Second World War is vanishingly small now actually, it was such a long time ago. But because I think we kind of got frozen in time as a moment that the Second World War was kind of a generation ago, and we've continued that feeling, that it's about a generation ago, right? So we still talk about it as if our grandparents, or as if people who are grandparents today, were involved in the war, fought in the war. My grandparents did fight in the war. My grandparents are no longer with us. We're getting to the point now actually where there's not very much actual memory, folk memory of the war.
So that's something that we think of as being very recent that's not very recent, whereas the Empire is something that we think about as having happened a long time ago, so long ago, why are you dragging up the past? Whereas actually, many of these countries, India and Pakistan and Bangladesh became independent in the late 1940s; most of Britain's African colonies and the Caribbean become independent in the mid 1960s, still very much within living memory. There are still quite a lot of people alive in Britain whose family have history within the Empire, they themselves do, or it's only a generation back.
And it's interesting, I think, the way we talk about the two things, that the Empire is something that happened so long ago that if you tried to talk about it now you're just dragging up the past, and the Second World War is something which apparently happened so recently that you can't, as a historian, ever criticize people's interpretations of it or talk about correcting historical record because it happened so recently. And it is a sort of interesting disconnect. It's a kind of soft British patriotism, which is completely unthinkingly uncritical of imperialism and remembers Empire as a sort of Victorian aesthetic, doesn't remember it as a 1940s, 1950s, 1960s aesthetic.
HZ: I wonder what most people's boundary is for news events becoming history, because it's sort of theoretically immediate.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: Yeah, it's funny because I think from a historian's perspective, it's to do with... Well, actually from a historian’s perspective, it's to do with the skills and the tools that you use to think about it. It's not to do with distance, it's not to do with timing. Historians, I think, think about history because we think about ourselves as people who use particular tools and particular skills, and we have particular ways of engaging with the past, and we can do that about something that happened last year.
HZ: I guess the theme of this Bonus compilation is thoughts and feelings, although maybe that’s the subtextual theme of absolutely everything, and therefore it’s not particularly remarkable that the next section is too. Hannah McGregor appeared on the episode Sentiment, talking about sentimentality in literature. And we got to talking about Louisa May Allcott’s novel Little Women, wherein the four March sisters live with their saintly Marmee while father is far away being an army chaplain during the American Civil War.
HZ: In the book, it is considered far more integrity-laced to write what you know, and with real emotions, but in reality, Louise May Allcott was doing that to make money because she much preferred writing swashbuckling genre fiction.
HANNAH McGREGOR: She sure did. Yeah. I mean, it's a great example of a version of a common genre form that has endured specifically because it was actually really messing with the genre at the time. This is a constant challenge for literary scholars that a lot of the texts that endure are actually the outliers and that we actually spend very little time talking or thinking about books that were the mainstream in their historical moment.
But it was absolutely this weirdo lesbian being told by her publisher there's a lot of money in girls’ fiction and her being like, "Okay, fine. I'm a working writer. I'll write some girls’ fiction. Here's some girls’ fiction," and also just refusing to play the game a little bit.
One of my favorite bits of that: we have actual quotes from her saying that - she published the book in two parts and for the second part, everybody wanted Jo to end up with Laurie because that's the conclusion of the sentimental arc. And because Jo was based on her, she was like, “No, Jo, isn't gonna end up with anybody. Jo wants to be a writer. And if you're gonna be a woman and a writer, you can't get married because there's no space for your career if you're running a household.” But her publisher was like, “No, Jo has to get married, otherwise people will be wildly dissatisfied.” And she was like “Fine. You want Jo to get married? She's gonna marry a weird old German guy.”
HZ: "I'll show you wild dissatisfaction! It's everyone's marriage in this book!"
HANNAH McGREGOR: And Laurie's gonna marry her horrible little sister. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, a real fuck you to the expectations.
HZ: I still feel a bit sore about how all that turned out. And they're gonna set up a boys' school.
HANNAH McGREGOR: And they're gonna set up a boys’ school.
HZ: How empowering.
HANNAH McGREGOR: I think it's such an interesting example of somebody who is so obviously bucking against the restrictions of what they can say in their moment. There are these genre expectations being forced upon her, and there's her very practical desire to write a book that will make her money. And then there's that attempt to just sneak in something that sort of just says “No” to all of those expectations.
HZ: When you were describing the tropes of sentimental fiction of the 19th century, the other example that I thought of was What Katy Did.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Mm-hmm!
HZ: Where you've got a bit similar to Jo in Little Women, a sassy, naughty female lead. But then she is kind of fully converted into the sentimental with a spinal injury and the counsel of her beatific disabled cousin.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yes. Yes, absolutely. And that is an important part of the sentimental education that a lot of these girls undergo, right? That Jo becomes better because of Beth's illness. You sort of encounter this perfect paragon of sentimentality who has to be dying, because there is nothing more perfect that a woman can do than die. Truly the purest way for us to exist is to die. And we still see this up to the present day, repeated in contemporary culture: the dead wife is the perfect wife.
HZ: Except in Rebecca.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Except in Rebecca, which actually makes, that's why Rebecca is an interesting Gothic. The Gothic, the dead wife is a sinister presence; in the sentimental, the dead wife is the perfect wife. There's a really interesting sort of trend in scholarship recently about sentimental novels pointing out that while the goal of the sentimental narrative is the emotional maturity of our heroine, the story becomes deeply boring the second she becomes mature - because the emotionally mature heroine doesn't do anything. And so we spend a lot of time in the childhood. We dwell in the childhood, because that's when the narrative is interesting. That's when she can actually go out and do things, but she's gotta become a Marmee at some point. Otherwise she has not sort of reached her… her conclusion.
HZ: Marmee or death.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Marmee or death!
HZ: That's it. "Her conclusion"! What was it they say in Never Let Me Go? "Completed".
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yes, yes, exactly. There are two ways that a woman can become completed, and that is that she either becomes a Marmee or dies.
HZ: Either way: desexualized; a life lived in sacrifice and deference to others.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yes. Yes. All of the above.
HZ: Anger: present, but contained.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah. Yeah. And within this imagination of what is possible for women, we then have to have like institutions and systems that punish or manage women who refuse to fit into those moulds. So we've got hatred of the spinster, the suspicion of the spinster; we've got the long history of institutionalizing women for hysteria, because they refuse to fit into these moulds. So we've got ways of managing all of these unruly bodies, that aren't willing to either die or become a Marmee.
HZ: Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer talked on the Self-Help episode about the things they’ve learned from living by various self-help books on their podcast By The Book. I asked them what they think about the term ‘life hack’, which came out of ‘hack’ being used in computing as a solution that might be a little unorthodox and perhaps cruder than usual, but probably quicker. Like chainsawing a path directly to the centre of the hedge maze. ‘Life hack’ is attributed to technology writer Danny O’Rourke in 2004, to denote the kinds of little bits of script programmers would write to make their daily lives easier, programs to help them remember household chores or loved ones’ birthdays. Whereas now ‘life hack’ will mean things like turning toilet rolls into all kinds of storage or decorative items, or making mashed potato out of crisps - which seems more hassle than mashing a potato to me. And a lot of the life hacks are just fairly standard tips, so why do they get called ‘life hacks’?
KRISTEN MEINZER: I think it's a way to get men to read self-help books. And it's also you know, the language of a lot of social media too, just like, “Oh, we don't want to actually have to work for this. But watch this 30-second TikTok video to find a hack for this.” There's a lot of you know, let's do it quickly. Let's have it sound masculine. When I think of a hack, I think of like a machete.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Like a hacksaw?
KRISTEN MEINZER: Yeah! This has got to be tough. This has got to be quick. This has got to be gotta be violent, and it's gonna pay off. That's what I think of when I think of hacks. And I also think that very rarely is a hack life-changing. If it's something that only is a 10 second difference in my life, or a 30-second thing that I have to do differently, I don't usually find that transforms my entire life.
HZ: Transformation is only 30 seconds of video consumption away, and yet remains just beyond our grasp.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Shocking, I know.
HZ: Also, the life hacks are often just doing things in a way you can do things that is neither better nor -
JOLENTA GREENBERG: I was going to say - sometimes it's just how to more easily separate like the egg white from the yolk. That's just another way of doing something and it's just a buzzy way of being like, “Here's a way to do it.”
KRISTEN MEINZER: “Here’s another technique in the kitchen.”
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Yeah - “technique”, thank you. Instead we say “life hack”.
HZ: I just want the currency of that term to fully dwindle.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Hopefully it is. It’s gotta be!
HZ: Since Jolenta and Kristen are mavens of concerted self-improvement, I asked them about new year's resolutions. ’Tis the season!
JOLENTA GREENBERG: I've definitely not made any resolutions since we've been making By the Book, because living by self help books is like making a new resolution every time you sort of sign up for one.
HZ: That’s intense.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: So I've sort of let myself off the hook when it comes to the actual new year's resolution.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Yeah, I don't really need new year's resolutions.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: See how happy and well adjusted she is? “I’m good!”
KRISTEN MEINZER: No, not because I'm happy and well adjusted! But New Year's resolutions - just they seem so fraught. And the whole idea of New Year New You, like what's bad with old me? Right? And so many people just fail at their New Year's resolutions, because most people aren't clear and specific and attainable when it comes to their goals. A lot of them also just feel very punitive. Very few people are making resolutions that sound fun. Why don't we write write wishes that aren't really about punishing ourselves?
JOLENTA GREENBERG: That aren't about like cutting out sugar.
HZ: Why don't you add something?
KRISTEN MEINZER: A goal I came up with mid-year this year was: I'm going to listen to celebrity memoirs while I walk, and just see how many I can get through it. See, that's my kind of resolution. It's not necessarily at New Year. And it's like, this is a fun thing to do. I'm resolving to do something kind of fun this year.
HZ: I've made two in adult life that have really stuck: one was to keep a spreadsheet of every book I finished, which was to get myself reading more. I've been keeping it for 12 years. And the other was not to click on any daily Daily Mail links, and both of those have gone great.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Oh, I love that second one.
HZ: It’s tremendous.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Yes, love it.
HZ: Both those resolutions of mine have been going strong for a decade or more. The resolution that I made at the start of this year was to spend more time with Allusionist listeners, and I did! I set up the Allusioverse Discord community, and we’ve had the livestreams, and the Allusionist patrons hang out, and it’s been really lovely, in my opinion, 10/10 new year’s resolution outcome. If you’d like to join us, you’d be ever so welcome; go to theallusionist.org/donate.
Thanks to you for listening to the show, and thanks to all the people who’ve appeared on the show this year, and in this episode you heard again from, in order of appearance: Jing Tsu, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, Tim Clare, Stephanie Foo, Lewis Raven Wallace, Charlotte Lydia Riley, Hannah McGregor, Kristen Meinzer and Jolenta Greenberg. I’ll link to the episodes they were in earlier this year at theallusionist.org/bonus2022.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
Washin - That’s washin with no G on the end -
washin, noun, aeronautics: an increase in the angle of incidence of an aeroplane wing towards the tip.
Try using ‘washin’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Martin Austwick makes the original music for the Allusionist. Hear his compositions via palebirdmusic.com and as Pale Bird on Bandcamp.
Our ad partner is Multitude. Thanks to Amanda and Carly for their work on behalf of the show in 2022. To sponsor an episode in 2023, contact them at multitude.productions/ads.
This is the last Allusionist episode of 2022, the show will return with new episodes mid-January 2023, and in the meantime stay in touch, find @allusionistshow on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. And you can hear or read every episode, get links to more information about the topics, and donate to the show and join the Allusioverse community, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
