Visit theallusionist.org/disobedience to listen to this episode and find more information about the topics therein.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, find some language that someone left out on the verge with a sign saying, "Free! Take it!" and it appears to be in perfectly good condition so I pick it up and carry it home, pat it dry, wish it goodnight, then discover the hard way that it's HAUNTED.
Today’s episode is - how to describe this episode? It’s a conversation with someone who has a new book out that’s sort of a personal philosophy of language. And I love hearing from people who have such a complex set of emotional and intellectual relationships with language.
Content note: we refer to sexual abuse or crimes against consent, and to suicide, but we do not go into any detail about these things, or describe any experiences. Also there are some category A and B swears.
Still taking your requests and language problems and queries about new or replacement terms you need, for an episode coming up later in the year, head to theallusionist.org/contact to deliver your thoughts to me in the form of written or voice message.
On with the show.
SO MAYER: Hi, I am So Mayer. I am a London based bookseller writer, editor, and organizer – not of myself, I'm very disorganized. And I have just written and published a book called Bad Language, which is a memoir and manifesto about language and power, and dragons. It's a book about the role that language plays in oppressing and controlling us, not just in how it's used by politicians, but the place that language has in the world, why we attribute authority to language – but also how language is what can free us from that and how we move from that one often very terrifying state. Language is something that we make, and that means we can take back the power of making it together.
But in a way, this book began with allowing myself to not understand things, to not understand words. So Bad Language began as a project called Disturbing Words, where I let myself be disturbed by what I didn't know about words.
HZ: What do you mean by you let yourself be disturbed? What does that involve?
SO MAYER: The more you think about language, the more you see how brittle social structures are and how much they're built on us, all obeying them all the time because it gives us a bit of ease. It's efficient. We're busy and harried trying to make rent. And so it's easier to just ignore all this fraught scaffolding around us. So it's being disturbed by that; being disturbed by my own compliance; being disturbed by my own assumptions; being very disturbed by some of the things you find in the OED; being disturbed about the history of dictionaries: my previous book was called A Nazi Word For A Nazi Thing, and the title comes from a dictionary, an 18th century English dictionary post-Dr. Johnson, which defines the word ‘cunt’, first of all, it spells it “c***”.
HZ: Oh no, not in a dictionary!
SO MAYER: In a dictionary - and defines it solely as “a nasty word for a nasty thing”.
HZ: Ah. That's revealing of the lexicographer.
SO MAYER: Yes. And also no help to anyone looking up a word in a dictionary who may be someone new to English or someone new to the word cunt.
HZ: They're like, “What's wrong with the word 'comb'? What did it do?” “What have coots done?”
SO MAYER: “Corn. Corn, what's happening?”
HZ: Some people don't like corn. They've seen it in too many piles of sick on the pavement.
SO MAYER: So dictionaries, like all tools of power, can be used to obfuscate, can be used to take things away from us as extractive powers.
The more we look into social structures, the more many of us realize we don't fit into them. Naming myself as non-binary was only something that happened in the last decade, in the same year as I began the Disturbing Words project; you could say it was the thing that was most disturbed by that project became my adamant cis-passing in order to achieve an academic career, which imploded spectacularly. And then it became clear that passing and assimilation are never a win. However hard you try, they can always tell that you are doing it wrong. And also even if you do, the rewards are not worth it, because they're not rewards, they're another form of containment.
So with each phrase or set of vocabulary - I'm a feminist, I am lesbian, I'm bisexual, I'm queer, I am a sexual abuse survivor, I am non-binary, i'm autistic - it's another piece of that dismantlement. It's another set of terms, some of which are interlocking, although not self replacing or self inferring, all of which are about saying "the universal or generic terms that I was given don't fit." And we only have to use these terms because of the normative universal usage. We should all be able to describe ourselves the joy of our work of communicating with each other would be making those words resonate for other people and finding out what other people's words for the interiority of themselves and their experience of being around other people was. So, the words that I'm using, like non-binary, are still words where I'm like, “Well...”
HZ: I use ‘unsubscribed’ for myself. Because it feels more accurate to me than non-binary.
SO MAYER: I love ‘unsubscribed’.‘Unsubscribe’ makes me think about coming out because it's something you're constantly doing or you unsubscribe - “No, I am really unsubscribed to that.” I mean maybe we can think about binary gender as being like malicious spam. I'm not just unsubscribing - trash, report, blocked.
HZ: Yeah, “How am I still on this mailing list?”
SO MAYER: Yeah, exactly. I was using gender non-aligned term taken from the non-aligned countries of the 1970s, which were not in the spheres either of the capitalist west or the communist east. And I thought this was really clever – but of course it involved the amount of explanation I've just given you. So one of the words that I wrote about in Disturbing Words was ‘align’ and how I don't feel – I feel very crooked also because of physical disabilities, I can't walk in a straight line, things like that. So, once again: language is something that we make, but in order to be able to make it, we have to not be in assumed crash position. Because if you are adrenalised, if you're panicking, if you are under attack at all time, it's very hard to listen to your peers and talk about the nuances of the complexity of words that we might invent to say for ourselves. Because it's like, actually I just, I need to make rent, I need to get out of this state, I need to get away from my abuser. I need meds; and I will say the word that fits me into the medicalisation slot that is necessary to obtain that. And then that word obtains power - but it's not necessarily chosen from within community. Because they are still scientific terms. If you're naming yourself as a member of this marginalised group, if you're saying I'm queer, you are naming yourself as someone who couldn't possibly know anything about yourself. And even more so if you are a person of colour, even more so if you name yourself as mad.
HZ: Yeah, well, you're doing cishet whiteness wrong, so that can't be allowed.
SO MAYER: Yeah. You are you are exempting yourself from it or naming your exemption from it rather than aspiring to it or hiding under protection of it by doing good language of various kinds. So, naming your sexuality, naming consent based crimes, is doing bad language.
HZ: Speech acts have come up a bit in the show before, in the episodes about apologies, and about flyting. To summarize very briefly what is quite a big linguistics topic, a speech act is where saying something is more than imparting information, it’s also doing something in itself - like a vow, or an apology, or making a statement that has legal significance, or delivering an insult. And in Bad Language, So discusses coming out as a speech act.
SO MAYER: It's interesting that we call it ‘coming out’, because coming is a present participle and a gerundive. So it's something that it's already implied in the phrase that we have to do over and over and over and over again. It's a permanent state of existence. You can say, “I have come out,” but what you actually find yourself doing is coming out all the time.
HZ: You mean in terms of queerness rather than as a debutante.
SO MAYER: In terms of queerness, yes. Thank you for that reminder that it has this bizarre history where originally to come out meant to be presented to his or her majesty with curtsies and dancing, and then it was an acknowledgement that you were on the marriage market. So what a delightful activity that somehow gave its name to the act of, in a homophobic and transphobic society, sharing with those around you that you are whichever of the letters or singular or plural in QUILTBAG: queer, intersex, lesbian, trans, bisexual, asexual and gay; thank you to Nicola Griffiths and Kelly Eskridge for a word that can actually be said. Although my friend Carrie Marshall says it makes her think of knitting in front of an Agatha Christie mystery.
HZ: Why do you think that's bad?!
SO MAYER: To which I say what's wrong with that? But Carrie is a punk.
HZ: Punks can still do handicrafts.
SO MAYER: She'll get there, it's fine.
HZ: Also, quilting and knitting are very, very different crafts, Carrie.
SO MAYER: But they're also both very punk.
So in a different kind of social setup, we would share this, with our nearest and dearest, and with those in ramifying social circles at certain moments, such as when we did or did not want to have sex with them or when it was relevant. But there wouldn't be an assumption, a blanket assumption that actually you are straight and cis. So it wouldn't be necessary except in certain contexts. So the fact of coming out indicates that we live in a homophobic and transphobic society in which it's presumed, assumed that most people or everyone in fact, is cis and heterosexual, straight, and that anyone who isn't has to stake a claim to this in words. And not just once, but probably over and over again. The words we speak of ourselves, the words we speak in community and for community are silenced, are ignored, are made fun of. We are told they're just a language act.
And it's really strange to think that being queer or being trans, which are such bodily experiences, are experienced by so many people who don't have them as being a language act like, "Oh, you say you are queer. what, well, what does that mean?" is often the question you get. And it also doesn't have to mean something you do sexually with your body. It's an interior experience. And no one else says, "Oh, well, you're straight; what does that mean? What do you do? With what bits? Have you ever tried not being straight?" So it really gets into that power of language, but also the burden of not being heard.
When marginalised people speak among themselves, particularly if they're using coded languages or they're using language in their own way, it does produce power. And people who are used to being entitled to power, that tiny bit of power being outside them can feel very occult. As if, for example, their penises were being magicked off and placed in bird's nests, one of the extremely rational claims made in court cases reported in the Malleus Maleficarum; who would not trust a person who reported such a thing?
HZ: Well, you know, it's hard to prove that it didn't happen. Because you don't wanna check the bird's nest or penis area – you're scared of what you might find.
SO MAYER: Yeah. So, the standard of evidence is what we come to, and whose words have weight. And while I was researching the book, I learned a great phrase for this: testimonial injustice, which was coined by a British feminist philosopher ethical philosopher.
HZ: Miranda Fricker, who coined the term in 1999, along with hermaneutical injustice, both of which are forms of epistemic injustice.
SO MAYER: I'm going to read Miranda's words, she says: “Epistemic injustice is the wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower." So it's saying you don't have the capacity to know anything. And if that sounds familiar or gets you - I'm like, "Erkkk!" This is something that many of us hear as children, children are one of the marginalised groups too which this is addressed, and marginalised groups are often infantalised by being told you don't have the capacity to know anything.
HZ: And you're an unreliable source.
SO MAYER: And then therefore you're an unreliable source. So she breaks this down into two aspects: testimonial injustice, which is when prejudice causes a hero to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker's word. So certain speakers' words have credibility, and other speakers' words are deflated, like balloons that have had pins shoved into them violently. And then behind that is what she calls, and this is a much bigger word, 'hermeneutical injustice': "when a gap in a collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences." So when you don't even have a name or set of words for what it is that you're experiencing. So for a long time, I didn't have the word transphobia; I didn't have the word homophobia; I didn't have the word sexual abuse – and that's hermeneutic injustice. And that's not because one person was locking the dictionary away from me; it's because those words weren't coined for a long time in our society, because of literally the prejudices and behaviours that they name, and then because they weren't accessible to me because there's another form of silencing that is very prevalently being used at the moment, particularly in relation to book bans, which is that if we have hermeneutical justice. If we give people the words for themselves and the words for their oppression, they'll perceive them. And that would be terrible because that is giving people power.
HZ: And it makes real the bad stuff.
SO MAYER: It makes real the bad stuff. So Fricker says that “to address epistemic injustice, not being given capacity as a knower, we have to address testimonial injustice, the unequal value given to people's speech, their words about themselves, and hermeneutic injustice, the access to the words to describe our perceptions and experiences of the world.” And this to me is, you know, head exploding emoji. And because they are ideas in feminist ethical philosophy, they're not exactly given to you on your first day in secondary school. Like, "Hey, what we're gonna talk about today is testimonial injustice." Instead we learn phrases like "he said, she said" - and we all know that that is not an equal tennis match.
HZ: No, it's a seesaw that only goes up at one end.
SO MAYER: Yeah, exactly. So, testimonial injustice, epistemic injustice, gives a name, it corrects a hermaneutical injustice of not being able to name something that many of us have experienced and seen it in the world. And the way in which good language we come back to that is part of those injustices: if you see it, don't say it. Power holds onto power by preventing us from finding the ways that we can be disobedient, that we can overturn it, that we can find out just how brittle and dependent on our compliance it is.
HZ: Earlier you mentioned how before in your life you did not have access to words to describe anti-trans bigotry and crimes against consent. What happened when you did meet the vocabulary for what had happened to you?
SO MAYER: I think the first time that I met that vocabulary, I didn't understand it. I couldn't absorb it because it was a neutral and, in a way, analytical vocabulary that was being presented in a primary school class about reproduction. So that was the first time I encountered vocabulary about the facts of life, as they were called: the facts of life.
HZ: They are some facts of life, just not all of them.
SO MAYER: The facts of heterosexual sex and its relationship to conception.
HZ: Mm-hmm. Primary school?
SO MAYER: Primary school. Well, that was a book called When Mummy Laid an Egg, addressed as if all people of my age had the same experience, relating to our bodies and sex and sexuality, which was that it was this thing that happened to adults, and only to adults, and we didn't really need to know about it; but what we might need to know was about babies, and that we needed to know that in a gendered way, there were certain things that would happen to us differently when we were adults one day. And not only that, but that would be compulsory. So that was quite a lot of information to take in. It wasn't presented in a way that you could say gave me equal access to it. There was an assumption about a generalist audience, and I'm glad that there was at least that level and that amount of demystification and democratisation, but there was no further development and there was no sense that I could go and ask questions, going back to your point.
HZ: You and I, I think, are about the same age, and so we had a lot of our education – most of it, in fact – under section 28, so sexuality that wasn't heterosexuality was forbidden to be mentioned.
SO MAYER: Yeah. So I went straight from a religious primary school, a faith school that was conservative, to secondary school the year after section 28, clause 28 of the Local Education Act, which forbade local council money for being used in the promotion of homosexuality. So what that meant was that local libraries, public schools, could not spend any money, for example, on what we have now, LGBTQ History Month displays. But what it really was was a chilling climate that meant that teachers and librarians could not be out because there was a chance they could be prosecuted for the very fact of their existence being seen as promotion or what now would be called ‘grooming’. So lots of teachers and librarians left the profession. Some killed themselves. There was never a single successful prosecution under Section 28, because there did not have to be, because local councils – knowing where their money came from – complied in advance. The only way power can take power is by targeting the most vulnerable, by going after the people who are the least able to push back, the people least likely to be believed when they do.
HZ: When you accessed the vocabulary that made you understand the anti-queer oppression that had taken place and the crimes against consent: what happened? Were you able to frame different thoughts?
SO MAYER: The queer vocabulary and feminist vocabulary came first and laid the groundwork. So, again, we are about the same age – one of the results of Section 28 was queer culture, popular culture, and alternative culture that had been vibrant in the 1970s and 80s, decimated by AIDS and really by government's refusal to address HIV through testing, diagnosis, and treatment, which is what made it an epidemic, took up section 28 as a cause to fight against a refusal to go back into the closet. So in the 1990s, there was this wave of incredibly vibrant, informed, politicised queer culture. It was on the margins. It was on the edges, but pretty much everything I write, I acknowledge the local librarians of the library where I grew up, which was in a primarily conservative Jewish suburb, who took a chance to face out books in the Jewish Poetry section. So Adrianne Rich, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Irena Klepfisz, even better, writing about surviving the Holocaust. So these are all lesbian poets and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz in particular, radical queer, anti-racist, pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist and trans-Inclusive activist. So that kind of what we could call a most, a silent speech act within uncontested within the terms of section 28: they were promoting Jewish poets in a Jewish community. That kind of civil disobedience, I owe my life to. And so encountering their work and many of those poets also wrote about sexual violence, gave me a nascent vocabulary and an orientation, or so I would say, a disorientation. I decided to turn in the opposite direction and flee for the hills.
HZ: I was really interested in what you wrote about listening as both a passive activity that was sometimes forced and a sort of act of defiance and a form of resistance.
SO MAYER: In dominant culture, listening is regarded pejoratively, negatively, it's seen as something that you're forced to do. And if you do it, you are a kind of person who exists in those marginalised spheres or multiple marginalised spheres.
HZ: Some people hearing this wouldn't necessarily have that association with listening being forced. Could you explain that idea?
SO MAYER: I think it's a particularly difficult idea to explain to podcast listeners who are listeners by choice and inclination and are embracing actually the resistant aspect of listening. The pleasure of being open to someone else's meaning I think is one of the most radical things we can do. But we also have to do it as semi-permeable membranes. That doesn't mean we have to listen to everyone or everything. In the book I talk about listening is comparable to or framed along with bottoming: to embrace listening is the pleasure that it clearly is, the pleasure of being vulnerable, the pleasure of taking something in sensorially, the pleasure of taking time. Like bottoming, we may wanna do it in a situation of trust and absolutely of consent. So consensual listening suddenly sounds very sensual.
HZ: I mean ,that makes the bottoming analogy really makes sense, 'cause you don't want to bottom for absolutely everyone in this metaphor.
SO MAYER: Yeah. And you don't want to be - even if you enjoy bottoming, you don't want to be forced to bottom against your consent.
HZ: You were talking about the act of listening, but sometimes the only vocabulary available was the word ‘hear’, which I think typically describes an action that isn't necessarily opt in the way that listening is, where you choose to pay attention to something with your ears. Whereas hearing feels passive, but then there's not a 'listen' equivalent to 'mishear'.
SO MAYER: ‘Misten’. No. The words have, are used interchangeably, but we do also, I think, have an intuitive understanding of them as being different. Hearing refers to the sensory apparatus. If we are hearing, that is ongoing and constant sensory apprehension. Whereas we use listening, I think to imply both a more intentional activity and a more conscious in the sense of intention and in the sense of understanding. So if we are listening to something, we are trying to understand it or being put in a position of demanded to understand it.
But yeah, we don't talk about mis-listening. When I was in school, there was the idea of active listening as being a practice separate from listening, which tells you something about how it gets characterised, that we have to add that in front, to name intentionality, which we don't with hearing because that's just a state that we're in. Like seeing something and looking at something: two different activities.
HZ: You also talked about times in your life where you were told to listen and you were not encouraged to respond, or introduce speech yourself.
SO MAYER: Mm. I think that Victorian maxim of children should be seen, not heard – and preferably not seen – still has such a grip on our culture. So real children who have bodies and are joyous and noisy and vibrant are not expected to make their presence known. And that gets doubled down on by conservative religion and it gets doubled down on an education. We internalise that from when we're very young - many of us, not all of us, some people live in joyous noise-making communities. And that has an effect on how we use our voices, how we make noise together. I don't sing, for example. I am someone who was told that I couldn't sing, partially because there was an expectation I sing in a very high register because of my assumed gender and no, not happening. And so I was never taught to use a chest voice, or even lower. So I just don't. There's so much shame wrapped up around it. I won't listen to my voice. I won't listen to this episode.
HZ: I'm familiar with that. It took me only eight years to be able to tolerate listening to my own voice and I was having to edit myself for several days a week.
SO MAYER: I admire that so much; I admire your commitment to doing that. Double speed or nothing. Better to sound like a chipmunk than like myself.
HZ: Can you imagine what it would be like to live without shame? Because I physically can't.
SO MAYER: Yeah, I think none of the muscles or nerves in my body would de function because they are so busy dealing with fear-shame.
HZ: I think everything that I am is a response to shame. Shit; shit; I'm really nothing.
SO MAYER: Yeah. I mean, you know, a nothing, a zero, is an open space into which we could put something. So in a way, it would be wonderful to be that, that nothing –
HZ: Okay; I'm a little empty bowl.
SO MAYER: – without shame, not to get too Buddhist about it. And of course, it's not nothing. In a way, it was that realization of how difficult it was to use those words, to say cunt, to say fuck, to talk about what my desires might be, to experience the shame that came after that. And not just sexual desires, but to talk about the desire to be a writer, to be heard; to be heard in writing about sex and feminism and queerness.
HZ: Did you have to give yourself permission to be heard?
SO MAYER: Oh my God… Um... that's such a beautiful question, and I think it's still an ongoing question. My colleagues at Peninsula Press sent me an unboxing video of the books yesterday and I panicked and was like, “No, pulp it! Pulp the book! Don't send this out into the world. Don't, I mean, maybe it's just bad!”
HZ: What if you are perceived?
SO MAYER: What if I'm perceived? What if I'm exposed? And there are exposing things in the book. The book is very careful not to name anyone else or interpret anyone else's experience, for both emotional and legal reasons. Being perceived, being heard: we often think about the painful aspect of that as being misheard, being criticised, being deliberately misunderstood, being shouted down. And I've experienced all those things, of course I have. But the possibility of actually being heard is equally as painful. Because it also asks what would be the result of that, that if someone said, "Okay. I've taken on what your book is saying. What now? Back to you." And that's what a good therapist does: "I've heard you. Now what are you gonna do about it?" And then going: oh, supposedly through my educational privilege, I've been taught to take power from using language. And here I am using language and I don't feel powerful. I feel afraid and I feel ashamed, and I feel like someone's gonna hit me in the mouth.
HZ: it sounds like what you're describing is vulnerability.
SO MAYER: Yeah. Aargh! Do I want to name that? It's always worth remembering that the word ‘vulnerability’ comes from ‘vulnus’, which means wound. So vulnerability is the ability to be wounded. And in one sense that means being a permeable and not concrete being or object that can be violated. But on the other hand, if we flip it the other way and say, sitting with that ability: what if I sit with the fact that my body can be wounded, what does that open up for me? The first thing that opens up is fear, terror.
If we are lucky in the time and place that we're in, if we're privileged, there may be a way that we find a group of people IRL or people on the internet, or people who've written books that have also experienced this and give us tools to sit a little bit longer for what it might look like, to not feel that the whole time, or just to be able to feel it and name it. So rather than naming and shaming, being shamed, and then naming it and going, "Okay, I know what's happening. I can't stop it happening, but I can stop the cascade that comes after it.”
HZ: What is the effect of naming it?
SO MAYER: I'm with Foucault and Le Guin on this one: that is the only magic we have; that when we name it, we know it. And it may be possible that someone else will hear that name and understand it. And that is the most magical thing possible: communication. Not because it's without barriers, or because it's simple, but because of that struggle of the spark gap leaping across two people or two neurons going through that shame, like that is the only magic that I've come down to knowing. And it's awful! It's everything that really serious sensible books say about magic: it splits you in half, it uses everything that you have. It makes you an outcast, freak. Wow, people are really gonna wanna read this book, a toolkit for ruining your life. But it will make it better because then you'll be with us, and people who are like, “Oh, we did this. And now I just see it everywhere the possibility.”
HZ: In a way, you made a decent case for oppressing forever.
SO MAYER: Yeah, just get back in the ticky-tacky box, wear the grey uniform, take the Seconal, seek the security, follow the people who have the absolute power, kill yourself inside. Because if you are able to pass in that way in any way, it's marginally easier – you are just dead.
HZ: It's easier to be dead? Oh, love this positive message.
SO MAYER: That's what I thought for a long time, that it was easier to be dead inside than do this work. And I don't know, there were times during the book that I felt it was 50/50. But on the other side, I mean, conversations like this make me just… this is so magical, to be sitting here sharing this, and thinking about who's gonna come along and say, "Actually, what about this?" And the conversation will continue. Yeah. So, being vulnerable.
HZ: Aaaaaargh!
SO MAYER: Aaaaaaaargh!
HZ: So Mayer is a writer, organizer, publisher, and bookseller at the independent bookshop Burley Fisher Books in Haggerston in London.
Their latest book Bad Language is out 13 November 2025 from Peninsula Books so go get it - it’s unlike any other book I have read. Content note: the book does discuss childhood sexual abuse. And if you’re into Ursula K. Le Guin’s work, you should definitely check it out, as well as the other new book So Mayer has out which they co-edited: The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin, there’s also a free exhibition to go with the book at the Architectural Association in London, that runs until 6 December 2025. I’ll link to all those things at theallusionist.org/disobedience.
Podcast time, podcast time! Arnie Niekamp from Hello from the Magic Tavern has a new podcast out called No Skip Christmas; it’s all about Christmas music, and I got to be a guest on it to talk about one of my favourite topics, the difference between the UK and US festive pop canon. And, thanks to me (and the band The Darkness), Arnie is now freshly conversant in a couple of classic British innuendos, what a gift at any time of year. So check out No Skip Christmas in the podplaces, some of your other podfriends are on it too, exciting!
Also, help keep The Allusionist going by becoming a member of the Allusioverse at theallusionist.org/donate for as little as $2 per month - you can also sign up for free if you want to receive the occasional email from me with Zaltznews, and I do mean occasional, I simply do not have the executive function to write enough emails to riddle your inboxes. But if you do become a fully paid-up member of the Allusioverse, you get livestreams where I read relaxingly from my burgeoning collection of reference books - although weirdly both my dictionaries of saints have recently gone missing, is it a sign? - you get behind the scenes info about the making of every episode, and you get to be a member of the charming and supportive Allusioverse Discord community, where this week people have been sharing recommendations for films under 90 minutes, some dismay over the possible etymology for the French word for dungarees, and we are watching together the yarncraft show Game of Wool, the Great Canadian Baking Show, and on 15 November The Princess Bride. Join us at theallusionist.org/donate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary is:
leman - L E M A N - noun, archaic: a lover or sweetheart.
Try using ‘leman’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Music and editorial assistance were provided by the singer and composer Martin Austwick; listen to his songs at palebirdmusic.com and his experimental podcast Neutrino Watch at neutrinowatch.org; and you can hear us on our long-running podcast Answer Me This. It’s back! It’s resurrected! So go get that in the podplaces and at answermethispodcast.com.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, so I can talk winningly and admiringly about your product or thing, get in touch with them at multitude.productions/ads.
And you can listen to or read every episode, get more information about the episode topics and people discussing them, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and browse a lexicon of every word discussed in the show and click through to listen to the episode about it, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
