Listen to this episode and get links to all the guests and additional information at theallusionist.org/bonus2023
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, squirrel away little nuts of interest throughout the year and today’s the day I open up the stash and cry, nuts! Nuts of interest for all! For it is the annual Bonus episode - because the people who appear on this show always say so much good stuff, it doesn’t all fit into their original episodes, so at the end of each year we get to enjoy all the extra bounty. Coming up, we’ve got a mythical disappearing island, geese, human dictionaries, the dubious history of the Body Mass Index, a Eurovision thing that has puzzled me for years, Victorian death department stores, and much more.
On with the parade of bonus bits.
HZ: Translator and author Caetano Galindo returned to the show to talk about the history of Portuguese in Brazil.
HZ: Why is the country called Brazil? Were there other names that it is known by before?
CAETANO GALINDO: Oh yeah. Yeah, it was sometimes called Pindorama, which is a native word. it was called the Land of the Holy Cross, for instance. right from the beginning, the Land of the True Cross because they wanted to please the Vatican so that the Vatican would give them the land.
HZ: The Vatican’s never truly gonna be pleased. It's a discontented organization.
CAETANO GALINDO: They thrive on that. But from very early on, there was this word Brazil. And you know, there is the whole Hy-Brasil thing with the Irish - the myth of the enchanted isle that disappeared in the ocean. And those mentions of the word Brazil/Brasil in Ireland predate the existence of the Portuguese colony here; predate, in Europe, the certainty of the existence of us. That's kind of weird.
HZ: I've not heard about this disappearing island!
CAETANO GALINDO: Yeah, yeah, Google it. It's called Hy - H Y - Brasil.
HZ: It also had a few other names, including O’Brasil, Do Brasil, Brasil Rock and just Brasil, spelled in several different ways, and on one map from 1753 it is labelled “Imaginary Isle of O Brazil”. It was marked on maps for several hundred years, the last being from 1873. It was depicted as being a hundred-odd miles to the west of Ireland, with a bit of disparity in latitude, but it IS hard to get an accurate location for a mythical island that is shrouded by mist except for one day every seven years, very Brigadoon of it. It might have been a sandbank that has long sunk into the ocean; it might be full myth - nobody can confirm! But there is no known linguistic connection between the names of Hy-Brasil and Brazil.
CAETANO GALINDO: As it relates to us, there came first the demonym, I don't know how to say it in English, but Brasileiro - Brazilian - came before the name Brasil. And the brasileiros were the people that traded in brazilwood, what would become brazilwood, which is this very reddish trunk of a tree that was used as a dye and was very precious and was like the first thing that we exported and the Portuguese took from here. The word ‘brasileiro’ has a very interesting path because it becomes synonym with bootlegger, and then with nouveau riche, because the brasileiros were like a class of people that dealt in that and that went to the New World. Why brasileiro, why Brazil? Most of the time there is this explanation that we have the word ‘brasa’, which means ember, and that the redwood was like embers. So it was brasil. We do not know how many words that are formed with ‘-il’ in the end from a noun, but okay. And there is also the hypothesis that it may come from an old French verb ‘bresiler’, which means to come apart in pieces. And that it was a characteristic of that wood… there’s probably a beautiful verb for that in English.
HZ: ‘Disintegrate’ is not a very beautiful word.
CAETANO GALINDO: It would esfarelar. And so, yeah, maybe that; we don't really know, but the word is mysterious in its ways.
HZ: Are there people that want the country to be called something else?
CAETANO GALINDO: Not really, no. In the list of our problems, I think this is pretty low right now.
HZ: Seems reasonable, and being named after a type of wood gets around a lot of problems that other names present.
Elsewhere, there has been so much renaming in 2023 to keep track of: I’ve been excited to hear from several of you about US bird names getting changed, which I will be following with great interest. And here are a few updates about renamings that happened this year:
Black Boy Lane in Tottenham in London is now named La Rose Lane, after John La Rose, the activist, writer and publisher.
Four schools in Richmond, Virginia that were named after confederate war figures have been renamed - Richmond has been steadily renaming things to commemorate different aspects of the city and its history. So one of the schools is now named after educator Lois Harrison-Jones, who was the first Black female superintendent in Richmond; another school has been named for Francis W. McClenney, its first Black teacher and principal; Dogwood Middle School is named this after Virginia’s state flower and tree; and the fourth renamed school will now be the Richmond High School for the Arts, because that’s what it is.
Over in Australia, K’gari was the traditional name and is now the official name of what had been called Fraser Island, off the coast of Queensland.
But elsewhere in Australia, Macquarie St in the city of Hobart, Tasmania was NOT renamed - a 7-year-old named Rosie Booker had launched a petition suggesting the name be changed to an Aboriginal name like Kunanyi Street, because the eponymous Lachlan Macquarie had been responsible for the deaths of a lot of Aboriginal people. Hobart council rejected it, though, saying it was “likely to result in requests for other streets to be renamed.” Well, I’m sure that’s the end of that, then!
Over in Canada, Toronto Council just voted to rename a stadium after the late mayor Rob Ford, and even knowing just the headlines about Rob Ford, this seems like a plan that is going to age like fine milk, on a hot hot radiator.
In the episode The Box from early 2023, Subhadra Das talked about what is involved in denaming or renaming university buildings and said in many cases it’s not much more difficult than taking down a sign. But listener Tarnya wrote to say:
“In Brisbane, Australia, our state paediatric hospital had its name changed when it was revealed the person it was named after was homophobic and a racist.”
Not so much revealed as people pointing out that the person in question, Phyllis Cilento, a doctor and medical journalist, had published many racist and homophobic statements in newspapers and magazines - as well as bad medicine, like saying that vitamin C would protect children from snakebites. And yes, she did do important advocacy in the field of child and birth parent health, and in favour of family planning and contraception. But she also campaigned in favour of eugenics policies, such as forced sterilisation, which was enough for hospital staff to launch a petition in 2018 to change the name of the four-year-old hospital.
Tarnya continues:
“Unfortunately, it was NOT as simple as changing the sign over the door, with the process costing about half a million dollars! If you add to that the loss of philanthropic donors who opposed the name change and took their money elsewhere, it was quite the expensive venture! Probably worth it though, to remove the name of a woman who” - you know what, I didn’t want to have to go too heavy on the content warnings today, so look up some of Phyllis Cilento’s noxious views in your own time.
As Tarnya’s “dear old mum would say “they can stick their money where the sun don’t shine” 😜
The hospital was sensibly renamed to ‘Queensland Children’s Hospital’, with the idea that it would attract more more funding by having an obviously ‘public hospital’ name than it would with an eponym. Bonus: no embarrassing skeletons in the closet!”
True, Tarnya. That’s the thing with eponyms - they’re so fraught that I’ve come round to buildings and roads having boring names.
Lexicographer and Dictionary Corner maven Susie Dent returned to the show in the Siblings of Chaos episode, to deliver so many etymological treats that we didn’t even have time for, like how the words ‘text’ and ‘textile’ both come from the Latin for weaving.
SUSIE DENT: I love the fact that that's all to do with weaving. Like, we weave our words. Like, we weave our textiles. I love the fact that texting is from such an ancient family.
HZ: Yes. How did that happen? From
SUSIE DENT: I think it was very creative.
HZ: Is it all metaphor for what we're doing verbally?
SUSIE DENT: It's gorgeous - and actually clothes like that pop up all the time. So something succinct, I think, is from the Latin “under the belt”, because Roman togas would be kind of gathered up at the way, so they didn't sweep the dirty Roman streets. And so if something is tucked up or tucked in, it's succinct, it's under the belt. So I really like that one. There are clothing expressions everywhere, but, yeah, it's just they've stayed with us still.
HZ: Susie has been studying words that make us happy, such as ‘gossamer’.
SUSIE DENT: Yes, gossamer is such a beautiful-sounding word. So they're the silky threads that you see floating in the air in autumn time. And this has not been solved definitively, but we think it might go back to ‘goose summer’, which means the time when geese were traditionally eaten, which is around Michaelmas and St. Martin's, the day of St. Martin's, maybe? It was called St. Martin's summer for a while.
HZ: When is Michaelmas? 29th of September. OK.
SUSIE DENT: Yeah, so I think around then, lots of geese would be eaten. And this was also the time when these gossamer threads - which were actually spun by teeny tiny spiders - when you can see it floating through the air. So, I think, yeah, gossamer is surely one of the most beautiful-sounding words in English.
HZ: Maybe knowing that it's from geese will detract from it for some people.
SUSIE DENT: Yeah, I know, especially those of us who don't eat geese. I agree.
HZ: I live in an area with a lot of geese, and goose poos are enormous.
SUSIE DENT: They are. And everywhere. They're so prolific. Someone asked me the other day, “Why is it ‘silly goose’? Why are geese silly?” And the honest answer is I didn't know. I know they waddle a bit on land; but they hiss most of the time, and they're quite aggressive. I'm not sure why they're silly.
HZ: The ones near where I live stand in traffic. which would be silly except the cars do stop for them because they're so big.
SUSIE DENT: Let's face it, they were there before the cars, so I think we've rightly stopped for them.
HZ: Not so much a wild goose chase as a wild goose wait. Extra goose fact: the word ‘smörgåsbord’ breaks down to ‘butter goose table’.
After last episode Ravels, where we talked about the history of the term ‘cardigan’, listener Charles messaged me to say: “There is a much lovelier option for cardigan sweaters out there! In Spain, that cut of sweater is called ‘una rebeca’ because of the Hitchcock adaptation of Du Maurier’s novel, in which the titular Rebecca wears a lot of cardigans.”
Welllll we never actually see the titular Rebecca at all, the cardigan-wearer is the late Rebecca’s husband’s new wife, played by Joan Fontaine - she doesn’t even get her own first name, she’s just the second Mrs De Winter. Additional knitwear movie fact: in Croatian and Italian, the turtleneck is known as ‘dolcevita’ after the film.
Lindsay Rose Russell, who studies and collects dictionaries, talked in the Cairns episode about the under-recorded roles and influences of women in dictionary-making. And the genderedness of the genre is evident in the terms ‘walking dictionary’ and ‘sleeping dictionary’.
LINDSAY ROSE RUSSELL: I'm fascinated with these two terms, walking dictionary and sleeping dictionary, because dictionaries are supposed to be like big ugly books, but walking dictionaries and sleeping dictionaries are people. And to me these are just really evocative terms.
HZ: It’s been a while since I’ve heard the term ‘walking dictionary’ used but people did still sling it around in my childhood, “He’s a walking dictionary!” just to mean someone has an extensive vocabulary - or perhaps just used one word that seemed fancy. But I haven’t heard it used particularly as a criticism - it did originate as a bit of a diss though, and remained one for quite a while - its first known appearance in print was 1609.
LINDSAY ROSE RUSSELL: A walking dictionary is a person, but most often a man, who supposedly has a lot of knowledge. The walking dictionary shows some of the sort of masculinity of the dictionary, because it's often a man and often, in many instances of people talking about walking dictionaries, walking dictionaries are annoying. They are not pleasant, and they just yammer on at you.
HZ: ‘Sleeping dictionary’ is a later term, showing up in print from 1835.
LINDSAY ROSE RUSSELL: It's still in use today, also sometimes known as ‘long-haired dictionary’ and ‘pillow dictionary’. A sleeping dictionary is a person, most often a woman, who teaches somebody else her language in the context of having a sexual romantic relationship with them.
And so the idea that a walking dictionary is a sort of a masculinist project that collects knowledge in a way that also alienates it from context and use - so the words that a walking dictionary dispenses are sort of without any power or punch to them, it's just, oh, you just know that to know it, instead of knowing it to apply it to something, or knowing it to actually amuse whatever audience you're with; you're just being annoying, and sort of empty-headed in your universalized knowledge of something.
Whereas ‘sleeping dictionary’ shows some of the place of the feminine within some of the ideologies of the dictionary, that women, their linguistic knowledge can be instrumentalized, for ends that have absolutely nothing to do with them. Their knowledges are instrumentalized in a way that allows men to acquire linguistic proficiency and move on about their business of doing something, and makes the sort of sexuality of a woman the most important feature of her, even though there's a linguistic edge to this. And so to me, these two terms are revealing of the ways that gendered ideologies have always informed what dictionaries are and what they do in the world, and that those things are very different from the things that we tend to celebrate dictionaries for doing.
HZ: I heard from so many of you who were so glad to hear Aubrey Gordon on the show talking about fatness, and use of euphemisms like ‘fluffy’. Aubrey has also done a lot of research into the science around anti-fatness, such as BMI. This section contains mention of eugenics and anti-Black racism, along with discussion of anti-fatness. So if you need to skip that, scoot ahead ten minutes.
HZ: BMI was not invented for the purpose that is more recently being used as.
AUBREY GORDON: It sure wasn't. It was developed by a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, and statistician.
HZ: Ooh, a triple threat.
AUBREY GORDON: None of those threats were a doctor. So he developed the BMI at that point called Quetelet Index - his name was Adolphe Quetelet - to essentially establish what he thought was the average and therefore ideal man.
HZ: Quetelet wrote in his 1835 book A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties: “If the average man were completely determined… every thing differing from his proportions or condition, would constitute deformity and disease; everything found dissimilar, not only as regarded proportion and form, but as exceeding the observed limits, would constitute a monstrosity.”
Determining the average man seems an unnecessary exercise to me, and of course not one that was meant to spawn a metric to be used in modern-day healthcare. It was also based on a very small sample group, and a narrow demographic of white men.
AUBREY GORDON: It was entirely based on French and Scottish, I believe, military conscripts in the 1800s.
HZ: They represent us all.
AUBREY GORDON: Who among us is not a French or Scottish military conscript? And part of what we know is that in the last couple of hundred years, our bodies have changed pretty significantly in a bunch of different ways. It seems real weird to tie our weights to a ratio determined by soldiers from the 1800s. From there, it sort of sat on a shelf because people didn't really know what to do with this ratio of weight to height or why you would want to know. People who did pick up Quetelet’s work were Sir Francis Galton, as part of the move towards eugenics. Bleurgh.
HZ: Listen to the episode I mentioned earlier, The Box, to hear more about Sir Francis Galton and his part in the eugenics movement.
AUBREY GORDON: And the other folks who picked Quetelet's work and Quetelet's Index were life insurance companies who were looking for reasons to charge some policy holders more. And they decided to charge fat people more and used the BMI over time came to use the BMI as their standard rubric for who's considered fat or not. And then its sort of universality seemed to back its way into individual medical care provision, which it was absolutely never designed for. Even the study that ushered in use of the BMI more broadly was done by Ancel Keys, who's a very famous researcher, and found that the BMI versus hydrostatic weight measurement or calipers, were the other two measures that they used, that the BMI was the least inaccurate, and that it correctly predicted obesity, quote unquote, “50% of the time”.
HZ: Ooh!
AUBREY GORDON: Yep.
HZ: It's like horoscopes.
AUBREY GORDON: You've been very generous to horoscopes with that one. But like yeah, absolutely. And, in all of those cases, the bulk of this research was happening - almost all of it was happening on white people, and almost all of the research happening on white people was happening on white men. The BMI has never been meaningfully adjusted for anyone who is not a white man of western European descent. So whole swathes of the world are being measured against some very long since dead soldiers from France in the 1860s or whenever.
HZ: And there was a lot of medicine of the time that I don't think people would like to continue using now, like surgery without anaesthesia, doctors not washing their hands after delivering babies and killing the next baby and parent they deliver…
AUBREY GORDON: This is also the era of hysteria and neurasthenia. This was also the era certainly in the United States of proposed mental illness called drapetomania, which was diagnosed frequently. Drapetomania was defined as the irrepressible desire in slaves to run away. That was considered to be a mental illness: you don't wanna be owned by a person.
HZ: Otherwise it is just not an urge that you can account for.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah. This is an especially unsavoury time in medicine, and it's before the standardization of medical schools. It's before folks believe in germs. This is not an era to lift up. This is when we were all mystified by how colds happen. We could really move on from that point now, that feels safe to say, to me. And even as we use it now, we use it as a stand in measure, a proxy measure, for other much more reliable measures of health, like someone's haemoglobin levels, or their heart rate or blood pressure, any number of other things that we can measure much more readily and easily and precisely than taking someone's weight and going, “Statistically, that increases your risk of this other thing that we could test for, but we're not gonna.” It's a very strange way to go about things.
HZ: It's almost, if it's not about facts at all,
AUBREY GORDON: Helen, you're coming dangerously close to cracking the code.
HZ: Too scared. Must retreat.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HZ: Since Aubrey and I talked a few months ago, the American Medical Association announced that it, I quote, “recognizes issues with using BMI as a measurement due to its historical harm, its use for racist exclusion, and because BMI is based primarily on data collected from previous generations of non-Hispanic white populations.” Does that mean they’re going to stop using it? No!
Anyway, take your pick of things that are misused or misappropriated around anti-fatness; here’s Aubrey on the body positivity movement.
AUBREY GORDON: Body positivity is a movement that really rose out of two sort of different spaces. One was eating disorder recovery spaces, and the other one was radical fat activism, which in the United States dates back easily to the 1960s, some say prior to that. And essentially what happened was in the early 2000s, a bunch of corporations and advertisers figured out that there was this movement happening where people were trying to figure out how to do right by folks of different body sizes, different abilities, different gender identities and expressions, that there was sort of this coalition forming around justice on the basis of our bodies.
And many of those advertisers - Halo Top Ice Cream; honestly, even Weight Watchers at one point; Dove; plenty of companies - went ahead and sort of co-opted body positivity and put it into 15- or 30-second ad spots, where all people could really take away was, “Body positivity must mean feeling positive about your body!” and stripped all of the sort of politics outta the movement by flooding it with folks who'd seen ads on TV, not necessarily folks who were steeped in a shared like anti-racist or class justice politic or any of that kind of stuff. Which also means we now get things like people saying, “I'm body positive, as long as you're not obese.” Or, “I'm body positive, as long as you're happy and healthy.”
HZ: “Happy and healthy.”
AUBREY GORDON: I'm like, “Hey man, I am fat and depressed. No one is going to read me as a person who is happy and healthy.” And I also don't think that that means that I need to feel terrible about how I look all the time. Nor does it mean that I ought to experience more barriers to healthcare than anyone else, or lower pay at work, or perfectly legally being fired from your job just because you're fat. All of these things are seen as the price of admission for fat folks. And now that gatekeeping is also happening in body positive quote unquote spaces, which is rough.
HZ: Great.
AUBREY GORDON: Great, neat! I just don't find that particularly productive, nor do I find it particularly productive to shift from a standard of beauty to an equally sort of fickle standard of health. All of us at some point in our lives, temporarily or permanently, will become ill or disabled. Setting the goalposts at like “You can feel fine about yourself as long as you never get old!” is not gonna help people when most of us get old.
HZ: Yeah. It's a good way to sell products though.
AUBREY GORDON: It sure is. Boy oh boy.
HZ: “Wanna stave off death? You can't - but you could try!”
AUBREY GORDON: “You can look like you are! Fill in those wrinkles!”
HZ: With our face fat, we have achieved that.
AUBREY GORDON: That's right. That’s right. I got a baby face. I'm almost 40. No one thinks so.
HZ: Are you?
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah, look at that! Wahey!!
HZ: You look like you were born last week.
AUBREY GORDON: That's right. That’s right.
HZ: Old baby is my look. It's very dignified.
AUBREY GORDON: I really enjoy that.
HZ: Historian Dean Vuletic came on the show to talk about the many linguistic controversies and complications of the Eurovision Song Contest. He also cleared something that has been bothering me, a joke people make about when a competing country scores zero points.
HZ: Why is there this trope of people saying “nul points”? Because in the actual contest, no one would ever actually have the cause to say “nul points” because it's not like judges would allocate nul points.
DEAN VULETIC: This goes back to the origins of the contest, the fact that the contest was born in the mid 1950s, at a time when French was still an important language in international diplomacy, also in culture. And this is also one of the reasons why French language wins dominated Eurovision in its first decade. So actually the official languages of the European Broadcasting Union are English and French. And historically the two languages have also been represented in the hosting of the contest. So even today, you'll still see some French being spoken by the hosts of Eurovision. And this is where we get that catchphrase, “nul points”, or even “douze points”, twelve points.
HZ: Yeah, but it makes sense that people would say “douze points”, because that is actually something that gets said every contest when they reward twelve points. But they never reward nul points.
DEAN VULETIC: Not anymore, but there was a time countries could get nul points.
HZ: Wow! Harsh.
DEAN VULETIC: Yep. And of course, still some countries - let's not mention any names, but maybe we should, like the United Kingdom -
HZ: Ouch.
DEAN VULETIC: - have also received nul points in recent times. But the voting system has changed where it's less likely that a country will get zero points. But yeah, it has happened. And that's also how that catchphrase became popularized.
HZ: From Eurovision to DEATH. On the episode entitled Death, Evie King talked about her job as a council funeral officer, arranging funerals and dealing with other posthumous affairs for people who don’t have other people to do it - or Evie has to track down their relatives.
HZ: You must have to deal with a lot of people where their connection to the dead person doesn't exactly inspire grief out of the emotions.
EVIE KING: Yes. Yes, sometimes the person's been a source of great stress and trouble. Sometimes they haven't spoken for double figures years. And there's a sort of, I think they call it a complex grief, where it's based in lots of unresolved things that will never now be resolved, and still feeling that feeling of loss, but with all of these overlaid guilts and anger. So those conversations often go the same. I'll phone up and I'll have found them somehow, whether it's through Instagram, Facebook, address books, last number dialed, and they'll immediately blurt out everything that ever went wrong in that relationship. Because I am so neutral, and they're so shocked, that everything comes out.
And sometimes things I don't wanna know, like really distressing details of abuse or things like that, and then they'll say, “You must think we are such a messed up family. You must think we're horrible people.” And I'll always say, “No.” Because, you know, it's so weird how we are put together as families. It's like collecting a raffle ticket at the door and being matched up at random with some stranger, and oh by the way, you have to love each other and completely get on. What are the odds? If you were matched up with, out of a pool of a thousand people, you were matched up with someone at random, what are the odds you would love them and you'd get on with them and you wouldn't have any problems with them at all?
And so many outside factors can also affect things, like I've had families that have broken down because an accident has changed the personality of the person, and as much as they were loved, they couldn't be lived with anymore, they were just lashing out. And so the relationship of old was still held very close to the person's heart, how they used to be, but they couldn't be around them for the last ten years because they would just scream and throw things. And so there's that double sadness, they've lost the person twice.
But I always say I meet more dysfunctional families than functional ones, and I don't really know what a fully functional family is. We’re all just making the best fist of being thrown together, aren't we, in this scenario. People need to stop feeling so terrible that they haven't managed to maintain a connection when it's impossible to so do, or when they haven't been able to be that family they see on TV and in films. Life's not like that.
So yeah, I do have to have very honest conversations with people. But again, like I said, with the language of the job being straightforward, it does mean that you get sort of to the heart of things and can have really honest and, for the time I'm involved with them, quite deep connections. Because you're speaking probably the most, honestly, you've spoken about the relationship with anyone. Some people haven't told their spouse about things, or their children. So I'm the person, the first person they've spoke to about it. And so yeah, you have this brief, very intense relationship, and then you let each other go.
HZ: Maybe it's easier to talk to you because you are not connected to them or their family in any other way.
EVIE KING: Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm a disembodied voice on the phone, and I have no knowledge of them. And they can just say what they need to say, what they probably needed to say for a number of years. You get all kinds of reactions: it's a relief; it's a horrible thing because I think some people hold out for a reconciliation. Some people didn't want to be estranged, but the person pushed them away and they had no choice but to be estranged. And so it's an unwilling kind of estrangement. There's lots of complicated things that come up in that initial call. I mean, the phoning the last numbers is such a crapshoot. You phone one and it'll be, “Dunno who you mean, love,” and then it'll turn out he's a plumber and he did their toilet last week.
HZ: Oh wow.
EVIE KING: And then the one after that will be, “Oh my god!” and there's just loads of crying and I've hit paydirt here, because the plumber wouldn't be crying. So, yeah, it is a lot of complicated stories that you have to go through with a person. But as long as you are open, and just try and be as human as possible, it goes quite smoothly. I've very rarely felt I've put my foot in it. And yeah, I think people appreciate that relationship while it lasts.
HZ: Yeah, I think you being respectful, but not emotionally requiring anything yourself, makes you an easy person to interact with.
EVIE KING: My celebrant says that he has to be the glue that holds the funeral together. So he has to have enough of emotional attachment to deliver a heartfelt service and to do right by the family, but not so much that he wouldn't burst into tears himself, because they need him to say everything without a wobbly lip that they would. Everyone who gets up ends up having to abandon their speech half the time because it's too much. And his job is to be that person that can say it to the end and not wobble. And so it's similar for me. You get to be emotionally involved to a point, but yes, disconnect enough. That professionalism is something I think people cling to in a sea of chaos.
HZ: As well as dealing with the emotions of the living, Evie has to deal with the physical remains of the dead. We don’t get very gory in this section, nonetheless if you would rather not hear about cremation and its alternatives, then skip ahead 3 minutes 45 seconds.
EVIE KING: They're doing composting now, which is actually more the person because you are being broken down into your natural state. When you are burned, a lot of what's left isn't you, obviously.
HZ: What is it?
EVIE KING: So actually the ashes aren't - it's sort of a husk of you. It's gone through so much. There's not gonna be much of you left in there. It's gone into dust. It's dust, isn't it, ashes to ashes, dust dust. It goes through a sieve as well to get rid of your sort of bits and pieces, like if you've got an artificial hip or anything like that. Once you've been through the sieve, it’s what's come out of the process twice, so you sort of like double cooked chips, but you are the opposite, you've been diminished twice through two sort of filters. And it's something of the person in there, but it's less than you'd think, and it's not a significant, I think, as you would imagine. But the composting turns you into actual soil where you can be of proper use to people. They could take you home and put you in a tub and grow a tree.
HZ: That does sound useful. And also producing less smoke.
EVIE KING: Exactly; it's much better for the environment, whereas your ashes, people say, “Put my ashes in the garden and with the plants,” but they won't do anything, there's no nutrition left; it's all been destroyed in the burning process. So you're much better off doing a composting, which is not over here yet, but it's legal in a few states over there. And I think hopefully aquamation will come to pass over here as well. And you can get liquidized, which is better for the environment as well because no smoke.
HZ: ‘Aquamation’?
EVIE KING: Aquamation is what you want. Aquamation or composting would be my choices if I was having anything done.
HZ: Aquamation sounds like synchronized swimming or something.
EVIE KING: It does, it sounds like fun, doesn't it?
HZ: What do they do? Just liquidize you?
EVIE KING: Yes. They put you in - it sounds like a vat of acid thing, but it's not, it just breaks you down with liquid rather than fire.
HZ: I was looking at the history of graves and how it used to be that, after a little while, the person would be removed and someone else would be put in the grave, and perpetual graves weren't a thing until like 1650.
EVIE KING: Yes, since there's a lot of people and not much space. You know Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey was created to, naively, house all of London's dead.
HZ: Oh! Bold.
EVIE KING: Back in the Victorian times when there weren't quite as many of us. And obviously that never happened because they had that necropolis railway that went there and took the bodies from London to Surrey. And obviously that filled up really quickly. And they were like, “Oh yeah, that’s not possible.”
HZ: Well, they just keep coming. Endless supply.
EVIE KING: People keep getting born. Haha. That's the downside to this plan. People just keep getting born.
HZ: They didn’t think it through.
EVIE KING: But that's how we used to think. We used to think that there'd be one grave for us forever, because we were so unique. And then you realize there's billions of us and there's just not the facilities on Planet Earth for everyone to have their little space.
HZ: At least if you're compost, then you have a further life of sorts.
EVIE KING: Yes, and you're fitting in a lot better, you're slotting into the world a lot better than taking up an entire plot. So you get your space and you are useful. It's sort of a life after death thing-ish, if you wanna have something, it's life after death. I'm gonna do it via donating my body to medical science. I've arranged for that now. So whatever's left of me, they can then compost or aquamate. But I've said use every last spare bit of me, I’m not fussed.
HZ: The Death episode also featured Cariad Lloyd, who makes the show Griefcast and wrote the book You Are Not Alone, about what she’s learned from making her podcast about grief and from grieving her father, who died when she was aged 15. Here she talks about how 19th century Brits tried to make the grieving process very orderly. It’s not sad, but if you need not to hear about grief right now, skip ahead 11 minutes 45 seconds.
CARIAD LLOYD: The thing that I find really interesting about the Victorians is, is as ever, with all things, from plumbing to schools, they just like industrialized everything and gave it a really clear set of regulations. And they're very good tidying things up. They were like, “This is a mess. You know what we should all do is we should do this.” And so they set out super clear mourning rites, like: somebody dies, they need to be buried this way. This is what a funeral needs to look like. Everyone needs to wear black. Everything needs to be black, there need to be black bows on the door. You need to have two blokes at the front with black feathers in their head. You need to have two men with black canes outside your door. You need a carriage, the wood needs to be black, silver handles... And they just started making these rules about what a funeral looked like.
HZ: Is it because they had shares in black ostrich plumes and carriages?
CARIAD LLOYD: Somebody did. Somebody did, and there was literally like - it's called Jay’s of Regent Street, which was a three-storey department store, which only sold funeral stuff. I joke it was like the Primark of death, basically. And you went there to get your funeral clothes; that's how rigid that rule was. You couldn't just go, “Well, I’ve got black - it's a black jumper, but I’m sure it'll be fine.” Like you had to go and get new clothes for each funeral. Imagine how expensive that was: people were dying all over the place. Women had to wear stuff made from crepe. You had to have jet jewellery, because jet is not too shiny. So the idea was that you couldn't have something shiny and show-offy. Everything was muted, everything was pulled back, everything was grieving.
HZ: But you're still gonna wear jewellery. I mean, you're not gonna not go that far not to wear any.
CARIAD LLOYD: Oh my God, come on. Who are we? A little bit of jazz! And then alongside that becomes this rule of like how long you mourn. They had set rules of time of how long someone should mourn. So a widow - I can't remember the exact details, but it's like they mourn for a year and then you have half mourning and quarter mourning, where you can suddenly wear purple, you can suddenly wear grey. But for that first year, you're wearing black. To the point where if you did marry again - which obviously would've been common with people dying young - you were allowed to not wear it for the day of your wedding, and then you had to get back in it the next day. Can you imagine how awkward that was with your next husband?
HZ: “Honeymoon's over, dear!”
CARIAD LLOYD: “Babes. I love you, but remember the first one? He was so great.”
HZ: Did the men not have to wear mourning?
CARIAD LLOYD: The men did; they were expected to wear sombre, but it obviously wasn't as controlled. They had a lot of rules for their funeral-wear, literally the length of the sash on the back of their top hat had to be a certain length. They were obsessed with rules and they have this set of rules, which is like: a widow is a year, first cousin is six months, a first cousin who's a child is six weeks, like second cousin... Literally they've just gone through, there's like two guys sitting there like, “Let's just cover every single situation, then no one will be anxious again. They can just look up in a book of etiquette. Everyone knows what they're doing.”
HZ: Which is almost a brilliant idea.
CARIAD LLOYD: Almost brilliant.
HZ: Because part of the problem when someone has just died is that having to make choices is really an extra layer of difficulty.
CARIAD LLOYD: Yeah - you can see where it comes from. And when you read up what the Georgians were basically doing, it was chaos. This is the problem. That's why the Victorians are so hyper nitpicky. The Georgians used to just like bury people wherever, no one had coffins, they were piling bodies on top of each other. So literally they were like raising the graveyards up to the windows of churches. So that's why this idea of like corpse is rising from the dead was coming from, because a corpse could pop up. They just had no regulations. There was all this disease everywhere. So you can see where the logic comes from of like, well, “Let's make sure that we tidy this up.” But again, it's that one size fits all. Like as soon as you make a rule, well, there's somebody who doesn't want that and there's somebody who doesn't feel like that.
And what's interesting to me is we still have this idea that it takes roughly a year to, inverted commas, “get over” a death, and it comes from the Victorians. This idea that you need a year of mourning: we have let that linger, to be like, “Emotionally it's gonna take you roughly a year.” And after a year, most people don't give grieving people much…not empathy, but kind of like, “Oh, are you still sad? Like, it's been a year. Maybe give someone two years?” But my example is, if you are in an office and someone is by the water cooler weeping, and you're like, “Oh God, what's wrong?” and they're like, “My dad just passed away like six months ago.” “Oh, I'm so sorry! Oh, you poor thing.” If someone was there weeping and you were like, “What's wrong?” and you're like, “My dad passed away 20 years ago and I'm just having a bad day,” you'd be like, “Oh wow, okay. Wow. Um… Still?!”
Because we just expect it not to last that long. Whereas the truth of it is if you ask anyone grieving, it's a lifelong process, you have good days and bad days. Obviously the longer it goes on, like, I don't wake up every day weeping. I'm not like just this pile of crepe and jet jewelry, mourning my dad father. It's not like a giant picture of him somewhere. But I still have days where it affects me and I still have days where I think, “Oh gosh, that's sad.” But we're just really struggling to move past that Victorian idea of like, “It's time. Your time is up, now you need to move on.” And again, I can see in Victorian society where people dying so much, disease being so prevalent. Of course there's a slightly more like, “How much are you gonna grieve for? Come on, you gotta live.” But with us, we don't need that anymore. We don't need to time people. People can take as long as they need. That doesn't mean they're not like enjoying their life or they should get out there or they're like being self-indulgent. I think we panic that people are gonna disappear into grief, whereas I think actually most people just want to spend some time being sad.
HZ: It wasn’t just the Victorians trying to impose order on the grieving process. Today, we’ve got the concept of the five stages of grief - although it has drifted from its original specific and intended purpose.
CARIAD LLOYD: So yeah, I am anti the five stages, I suppose is a polite way of putting it. The five stages of grief was from a book called On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kubler Ross in 1969. She's amazing. She was amazing woman. She was groundbreaking. She worked within the hospice movement. She was helping people during the AIDS crisis before anyone was willing to do that. She was a really, really impressive person. But she came up with this theory while she was working in hospitals; she was working with people who were dying of terminal illness, mainly cancer, which at that time in America, they just called ‘malignancy’. They didn't even tell you like, “You have bowel cancer or you have breast cancer.” They just say, “You have a malignancy.”
And she observed that most of the time they didn't tell people they were dying. They just wouldn't tell them, especially women; they would tell the husband, but not the woman who was dying. Or they might not tell the child, but they’d tell the parents. And so these people would be given treatment fully believing the treatment was going to cure them, and then they would die. Which is kind of awful, ethically and emotionally. And she observed that if you did tell them, if you explained to them this was happening to them, they went through five distinct stages until they kind of accepted they were dying. And that looked like - I always get them wrong. And I dunno why, because I've written about it so much…
HZ: Sneezy, Dopey, Rudolph…
CARIAD LLOYD: Geri, Posh Spice… Yeah, it is denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. So they would go through, they would deny it was happening to them, then they would be furious it was happening. And then they would try and bargain their way out of it. “If I pray more, if I'm nicer, maybe this cancer will go away.” And then they would be depressed, “Why me?” And then they would reach acceptance: “Okay, I'm going to die.” And if you allowed them to go through those five stages, they'd reach this place of acceptance where they could talk to their family, they could obviously sort out their affairs and they had a essentially a peaceful death. So when I read the book, I was like, that's fair play. That's brilliant. That's great advice.
I don't know when or why or how it became applied to grieving people. Somewhere in the midst of that book being written in 1969, it just became not about people dying - which is what it was written for - it became about people who are still living and having to deal with grief. And it makes no sense, zero sense, to be about people who are living. It's about people who are dying. Of course, you can reach an acceptance if you're like, “I'm heading for a full stop. I'm going to die. So this is why I kind of need to get myself together.” If you are grieving, you're still here in all the mess. You're still having to cope with all the chaos and the cognitive dissonance, and all the rest of it. Now, in grief, you might experience those stages, but you don't go through them in a linear narrative. You don't hit each one, boom, boom, boom, tick, tick, tick, and get to acceptance.
HZ: Well, you’re on schedule!
CARIAD LLOYD: Yeah! But thanks to this theory and the way it's been like subsumed it, like eaten up by all media, all films, all cartoons, like all books, anywhere, we now kind of think that's what's gonna happen to us. So when you join the club and you lose someone, or someone you love really dies, a lot of us come to it thinking, “I assume I'll go through these five stages. I wonder when anger will turn up.” And actually what happens is like: hour one, you are angry. Hour two, you're denying it, Then you're depressed. Then you are screaming at someone. It's all of this; grief is every single emotion you've ever experienced, happening to you at exactly the same time. And that's why it's so awful and so disorienting, because it turns your world upside down, turns you upside down, turns you inside out with how many emotions you're feeling.
And five stages has just lingered so badly. I mean, it's 2023 and people still believe it. They still think, “That's how I'm going to grieve.” If you google it like there's people asking, “When do I go through the five stages?” “How will I get through it?” “How do I get over grief?” Because we want to believe, understandably, that there's a neat, tidy, simple place where we won't feel this pain anymore, instead of the truth which is, “I'm going to have to carry this pain forever, and I will learn to carry this pain, and the pain will not hit me in the same way every single day. It will hit me like once a year as opposed to once every hour. But it's never going be fine that that person died. It's never going to be like a neutral feeling.” So it's so infuriating to me, as you can hear, that it's lingered because it's so appealing, and it fits into the idea of narrative that, like, when we watch a film or we read a book, the person feels sad that the person's died, they're angry, they punch a wall, and then they're okay. And we would all love life to be like that. But that's not how emotions work. They don't behave like that. So why we think that grief will work like that, I just don't know.
HZ: It's a hope, I suppose, that you can graduate.
CARIAD LLOYD: Yeah. You can call it hope or you can call it like absolute… What else in your life behaves that simply? And it comes back to that Victorian idea of, “We can have grief behave, we can tighten the screws on this box and make it do what we want it to do,” rather than going, “That's not how any other human experience works.”
The fact that it was written in 1969 as well. And I think we wouldn't take much mental health advice from that time. We wouldn't take much nutritional advice, gender advice. Anything you read from 1969, I think you would normally think, “Things were different then.” But yet with grief we've kind of gone, “Oh, but not with grief.” Grief is, “They knew what they were doing and let's just stick to that.” And actually, no one in the death industry agrees with it. Doctors and grief psychotherapists are like, “Oh no, no, it's very unhelpful. It's actually quite damaging to believe the five stages.” So I understand the want for it, but I think, again, if you zoom out and look at it, why would grief ever behave like that when… especially when, from my experience, you lose a parent, it's 50% of who you are, like they raised you: them going is not going to be five stages you walk through and then you feel fine at the end. It would deny his involvement in my life if I felt the same as I did before he had died, if I went back to that place. And why would I go back? I'd be fifteen again. Like, that's not possible to go back to this world.
HZ: It is a rough age anyway.
CARIAD LLOYD: Exactly. Exactly! I don't wan to go back.
HZ: The late 1990s styles, they're back, and they shouldn’t be, they don't deserve it.
CARIAD LLOYD: Oh my God, Helen, London is absolutely full of it. Absolutely full of it.
HZ: Rotten. Don’t go back, Cariad.
And that’s it, the ninth year of the Allusionist is complete! Except for the best/worst portmanteaus I’ve seen this year. In the portmantNO category: croissham - a croissant with ham in it; vibecession, where companies lay off employees in anticipation of, rather than response to, an economic downturn - I don’t think this sad phenomenon deserves a jaunty portmanteau; sklegging, that’s a garment that combines skirt and leggings; primpover, don’t make me explain, I can’t; peacamole, guacamole made of peas; and luxerjack, the luxury lumberjack. The best portmanteaus: vagician, which I saw on the door of a local salon offering intimate waxes; and squimp, which was a very tasty shrimp and squid sandwich.
There’s a whole channel devoted to portmanteaus, especially the really stinky ones, in the Allusioverse Discord, which you can join by supporting the show at theallusionist.org/donate. In return for your largesse, you also get behind the scenes info about the making of every episode, you get regular livestreams with relaxing readings from my dictionary collection, and watchalongs with your fellow Allusionauts - in early 2024 we’ll be joining with Shedunnit podcast to watch the 1982 edition of Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun, which is really all about Poirot’s resplendent swimsuit and Maggie Smith looking spectacular in the 1980s spins on 1930s fashions. All this could be yours! AND you’re keeping an independent podcast afloat as we head into the Allusionist’s tenth year, blimey. Join us at theallusionist.org/donate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is… Pavage.
pavage, noun, historical: a tax or toll to cover the paving of streets.
Try using ‘pavage’ in an email today.
In order of appearance, you heard from Caetano Galindo, Susie Dent, Lindsay Rose Russell, Aubrey Gordon, Dean Vuletic, Evie King and Cariad Lloyd. All of them feature on an episode of the Allusionist this year, and I’ll link to them all at theallusionist.org/bonus2023.
The Allusionist is edited, produced and hosted and about twelve other jobs by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick; hear his songs at PaleBirdMusic.com and listen to his podcasts Neutrino Watch and Song By Song.
Our ad partner is Multitude - thanks so much to Amanda and Carly for their work on behalf of the show this year. Ad spots are now available for 2024. If you want one, and have me talk compellingly and affectionately about your product or thing, contact Multitude at multitude.productions/ads.
A handful more thanks, to Tort, Lilly and Chris, for their work keeping the Allusioverse Discord a nice place to be; and thanks to Ashra for the inwhiches which she lovingly curates at inwhiches.tumblr.com. And thanks to you for listening.
The show will be back in the second half of January 2024. In the meantime hear or read every episode, find links to more information about the topics and people therein, see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and find the podcast on the socials, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
