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This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, draw language like one of your French girls.
We’re back, with a returning alumsionist who has been on a quest about lexicographers on a quest to define in dictionaries a pesky category of words: colours. So strap on your questing-packs and remember snacks. Content note: this episode contains a couple of category B swears. People sometimes ask me, “What are these categories?” They are explained in episode 4 of the show, Detonating the C Bomb, right down your podfeed.
On with the show.
KORY STAMPER: Dictionaries historically have been very bad at talking about and defining colours. One of my favourite colour definitions comes from Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary of the English language in which he defines pink as "a colour used by painters," which is like, sure. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Sam. Thanks so much. Yeah, yeah. You're not wrong. It's just, which of the colours, Sam?
And historically, dictionaries only included two types of colour names. They would include the basic colours – so in English, we have 11 of those, and those are the ones that you think of when you're thinking of like a fifth grader's box of crayons: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, you'll get grey and brown and pink and black and white – that's kind of your basic colours. And then there's something that's they're more what we call inherent colour names, and that's a colour name that's taken from a thing usually in nature – so lilac, we have a sense of that; lime is one; daffodil – they would include those. And then they would include a handful of like very weird literary colours, or, usually pigments.
But it was really patchy. The colour purple was really, I mean, it's a core colour name, but it was so unevenly handled – it didn't appear in dictionaries, in all dictionaries, really, until the 20th century. So really up until the 1950s and 1960s when Webster's Third was being planned and written, colours did not get consistent treatment in any dictionary.
I'm Kory Stamper and I have just written a book called True Color: the Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color, from Azure to Zinc.
How do you describe colour in a consistent way without a visual aid? So no colour chips, no paintings – how do you describe colour in a way that makes sense to everybody who hears you describe it, so that all of you are picturing the same colour at the same time? And that seems simple, and is actually really terrible. It’s not simple. It is an eternal quest; the quest to define colour goes on.
HZ: Definitely doesn't sound an impossible quest.
KORY STAMPER: Yeah, right.
HZ: In the Allusionist vaults is an episode called The Authority, wherein Kory Stamper explained what it involves to be a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster dictionaries, a job she had for some two decades. She talks about all the decisions about which words are entered into the dictionary, and all that goes into how they are defined… A lexicographer has to be meticulous, methodical, and amenable to a multitute of minutiae. Kory’s new book True Color is about the many people who spent years, sometimes decades of their lives writing definitions of colour names for the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
KORY STAMPER: I got interested in this, not through the colour side of things, but through the language side of things.
HZ: Of course.
KORY STAMPER: Back in 2010, I was working for Merriam Webster, which is a dictionary company, and they were revising their unabridged dictionary, which had first been published in 1961. It's called Webster's Third New International Dictionary. And they were finally putting it online. And one of my jobs was to go through and check and make sure that it rendered correctly online, just comparing the page to the webpage. And as I was doing that, I started finding these weird definitions for colour names. They matched the style of a definition from the Third, but they absolutely – they just were ridiculous. One of the first ones I ran into was a definition for 'begonia' as a colour term, it is “a deep pink that is bluer, lighter and stronger than average coral, bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet william", which – I recognise ‘coral’ as colour.
HZ: Yeah, I used to play tennis with Average Coral.
KORY STAMPER: But yeah, it's just: what does that mean? Everything after ‘deep pink’ is completely lost on me. And I thought, oh, that, well, that's kinda weird. But as I would review, I'd finding these definitions and they just got stranger and stranger and stranger, and they all had this same style where they would give you kind of a neighbourhood for the colour: so a deep pink, a vivid blue, things like that. And then they'd have these long explanations that would compare that colour to other colours that I had never heard of before. So colours like coppen [?] or rose d’Althea, or Josephine, aloma – I have no idea what colour any of these are, and I don't know why anyone thought these were common enough colours to use them as like orienting points.
So when I was sick of proofreading, I would pick up the Third and I would just start looking for colour terms and I'd kind of follow them through the dictionary. So I'd find one that used rose d'Althea in its definition, then I'd go to rose de’Althea see what that definition was. I’d kind of wend my way through the dictionary. So that's what got me started on this quest to see how these particular colours were defined this way, and I don't know who worked on them, which then led to me spending 12 years researching and writing a book about colour defining. A fool's errand, but I got to the end of it.
HZ: It is like you're a detective of other people who refuse to give up. Any regrets? Do you ever wish you'd never seen ‘begonia’?
KORY STAMPER: No, I mean, my only regret is that there's no interest in like a 17-volume series of works on this, because, as with most things, you start pulling back a corner of the wallpaper and then you find all this stuff behind it. It really did feel like, well, in order to be able to define colour, I need to be able to explain why you have to define it by using words at all. Why can't you just use colour chips?
HZ: Did you find any answers to that question?
KORY STAMPER: Primarily: colour standards are expensive to print for; colour printing really wasn't refined until the middle of the 20th century. But the other thing about defining colour is colour names themselves change. And so the same colour name can be used of several different colours depending on the field, the time, the application, or one colour can have 20-some odd names.
HZ: Hmm. You are making a case for paint chips, honestly.
KORY STAMPER: I know. Well, and yes. No, it's true. It's true.
HZ: In the period that your book concentrates on, which is several decades of the 20th century, you're accounting for dictionaries going from being like, "Why do you need all these colour names?" to "This is very important." Why did it become suddenly expedient to do a better and thorough job of defining colours?
KORY STAMPER: Part of that was a change in how dictionaries approached scientific and technical vocabulary. There had always been an interest in including the latest and greatest science vocab in dictionaries, but really in the 20th century, there was such a scientific boom after both the world wars that it was almost impossible to not include scientific and technical vocabulary. The other thing was that that boom was actually spurred by a lot of research into science and technology that came about because of both of the world wars. The US government, after World War I, poured the modern day equivalent of billions of dollars into colour research. There was one year that the congressional appropriations for research, colour research was the third most funded area.
HZ: Why did they need to spend that much money on it?
KORY STAMPER: Prior to World War I, most of the dyestuffs used in the world were produced by Germany. Germany was kind of the place where physics and chemistry was applied; it was the place to be if you were a chemist. And so all of our dyes, all of our colourants, most of the time came from Germany. In World War I, there was a British blockade, so Germany could not export any of those dyes, and that was a huge issue because dyes made up a huge amount of the German economy. So the German Supreme Command kind of went to these state-owned dye manufacturers and said, “We gotta find something different for you to do, because we're shutting these down.” And one scientist, under pressure from the supreme command, realised that you could take a really common byproduct of dyestuff manufacturer and weaponize it.
HZ: Oh!
KORY STAMPER: Yeah, great. Beautiful. So the first lethal chemical weapon used on the battlefield, which was chlorine gas, was made by dyestuff manufacture. The second lethal chemical weapon, phosgene gas, which replaced chlorine gas, was also a byproduct of dyestuff manufacture. So after World War I, when all of this came to light, America did not wanna be caught on the back foot again, technologically. So they poured tonnes of money into areas of scientific and technological research that they felt they needed to have to maintain world peace and national security. And because dyes had been weaponized, they reasoned that they needed to be able to understand as much as they could about the manufacture and storing and applications of colour as possible.
So they poured all of this money into colour research. And in doing that, they actually created this whole commercial boom, where suddenly places like Dow and DuPont had all this money to research colours: dyes, and paints, and all these different colourants. So suddenly in the 1950s, you can buy metal kitchen cabinets that are teal and bright yellow and pink, and you can buy a car in fifteen different colours, and you can buy hats and purses and pumps that match your car, right? Huge amounts of new and colourful things in the world.
So the government, in the 1930s, decided they were also going to help fund a way of sort of standardising the colours, all the colours used in art, science, and industry, and how we describe those colours. In 1931, a group of member societies and member companies all got together to talk about how do we solve these colour description and colour naming and colour production problems that we're all running into? And the National Bureau of Standards, which is a government agency, was heavily involved in this. And this group became called the Inter-Society Color Council – they're still around, by the way, if you wanna join. Join, and then you too can read about colour science today. But the Inter-Society Color Council decided the way forward was to come up with a colour standard that would be the dictionary for anyone who works with, produces, uses a colour. The ISCC and the National Bureau of Standards came up with this actually theoretically very elegant formula for how to adequately describe and define every colour that they could. And it was beautiful, it was beautiful. And they distributed it – and no one wanted to use it. Because these are all proprietary formulas. You can't measure my colour and say that it has this particular measurement, because that means anybody can now produce my colour.
So we have these two things colliding at the same time: we have this push towards scientism in the dictionary, and we have this huge government investment in colour research and a push to standardise how we talk about colour. And these two things meet in Webster's Third New International Dictionary. Inside of Webster's Third, there are between 3,000 and 4,000 colour names.
HZ: !!!
KORY STAMPER: Yeah. And that's just so many colour names. Too many colour names.
HZ: Too many. But then how many do you think is the appropriate amount?
KORY STAMPER: And who am I to say? One of the scholars that I talked to for the book ran a couple of experiments on what's the maximum number of colour names that a person can come up with in five minutes. And there have been other people who have done similar studies that are not time bound. And those folks say that between 300 and 600 names is where people land for colour names.
HZ: That's impressive, I think. That's many.
KORY STAMPER: It is many – but is it enough? Because clearly, clearly we have enough evidence – or the particular group that wrote these definitions for the Third – thought that there was enough evidence to include over 3000 colours.
HZ: One of the reasons that there are so many colour names listed in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is capitalism generating more and more names.
KORY STAMPER: In the 1950s, it was really common for car companies to sell the same colour year after year and just rename it every year so that buyers thought it was a new colour. Because what are you gonna do? You're gonna run around the lot and compare it to, you know, “Well in 1951 this was Coventry Grey-Green, and now it's Evergreen”?
HZ: I mean, who trusts their own eyes? I don't.
KORY STAMPER: Yeah.
HZ: You also mentioned in the book that in such things as car paint marketing, people like to buy the same colours, but their emotions are stimulated by a new colour name.
KORY STAMPER: Mm-hmm.
HZ: God, we’re simple creatures.
KORY STAMPER: We are. This is the trick of marketing. if you have a, I don't know, a dusty pink dress and you call it ‘dusty pink’, no one's gonna buy that because that's dusty, and dusty in our mind means dirty. But if you call it 'Josephine', well that's French and that's very like ooh la la. So words play on our emotions; marketers use that to propel us into a purchase; and that's reinforces our priors about what a word connotations and register and feeling is.
HZ: While florid and creative names like ‘average coral’ or ‘Josephine’ often did not help the dictionary user to understand which colour was being referred to, these problems weren’t solved by definitions that skewed too scientific.
KORY STAMPER: Oh, absolutely. And you get this especially with any colour named after a pigment. Chromium green, what kind of green is that? Well, it's the green by chromium oxide under this particular reaction. Ok – I'm not a scientist, so I don't know. The basic colours – blue, red, green, yellow – those are a mess to define because how do you define them in a way that makes scientists happy and is completely accurate, but in a way that means anything to anyone who is not a physicist? So you can't say that blue is the colour produced by the sensation from the visual reception produced when the retina receives light that is 476 nanometers – I'm already lost. I don't care.
You also can't necessarily define by analogy: you can't say blue is the colour of the sky. Because I, as I am sitting in my home office in a very rainy Philadelphia, the sky right now is mostly white. That's not blue. You can't even say “the clear sky”, because in the summer where I am, it's so humid that the sky is also not quite a clear blue. It's not as blue as it is. If I am in Colorado, a mile up in the atmosphere where there's very little air between me and outer space, and that blue is a totally different blue. You can't say that it is also the colour of water, because water is not actually blue. It's just we understand it as being canonically blue.
So we start getting into all of these difficulties where you can either be completely scientifically accurate, or you can make sense. And there seems to be no in-between for certain colours. One of my favourite definitions that was submitted for Webster's Third was for purple, which the definer had just defined as a non-spectral colour, which raises so many questions for everybody: And what's a non-spectral colour? What does that mean? But it's completely scientifically accurate. Purple is a non-spectral colour. Yeah.
Colour is difficult for even specialists to define, and that still rages a little bit: what is colour? Scientists would say it is a psycho-physical sensation. They would say objects do not have colour. Colour sits outside of an object. So the ball is not blue; the ball appears to be blue.
HZ: Oh, shut up, scientists.
KORY STAMPER: And the thing that's fascinating to me is that the arguments that I was reading from the 1930s are still arguments being had today in colour science circles.
HZ: Prioritising the information that promotes understanding: is it that?
KORY STAMPER: Yeah. If you're a scientist and you want people to have an accurate understanding of colour, then is understanding – is common understanding what you wanna go for? There's a lot of ink spilled over the definition of the term 'primary colour' in Webster's Third. Now, for people like me, slobs like me, who are not colour specialists, when you hear 'primary colour', you think red, yellow, blue, because those are the primaries. And a colour specialist would hear that and would let out a scream from deep within their soul, because there's a lot of different primary colours. What kind of primaries are we talking about?
We can just start with: there's additive and subtractive primaries, that's what they call them, which are based on light or on pigment. So the primaries, if you're dealing with light, are red, green, and blue, because those are the wavelengths that our retinas are keyed to. And if you're talking about painting or printing, then the primaries are cyan, magenta, and yellow. Okay. If you're talking about colour theory, there are some colour theory systems that have four primary colours, there are some that have five primary colours, there are some that have six primary colours.
And all that that means is that that's sort of a core colour within that colour theory system. But like, I just wanna know what a primary colour is, and colour scientists would say, "Well, it can be a lot of different things," which is deeply unsatisfying to a lay person who, I just want you to tell me what the primaries are. And so then we default to red, yellow, and blue, because those are the primary colours that we talk about the most. I mean, when I say ‘primary colour’, what do you think of?
HZ: Well, you wouldn't be surprised by my answer, Kory, so let's not embarrass me.
KORY STAMPER: It is also my answer, Helen. We're all good.
HZ: I wish I was more original.
KORY STAMPER: We’re all in the shit together.
HZ: I suppose. Ugh, dear. I mean, why bother doing anything? It just all seems impossible.
KORY STAMPER: Right. It does.
HZ: Colour definition seems to have a lot in common with language in that it is emotional, it is perceptual, it is slippery, it's ever changing, and all of that; it's different to everybody; and yet dictionaries are trying to approach both with particular precision. Maybe dictionaries are doing it wrong this whole time? Everything wrong.
KORY STAMPER: I mean! One thing that is really interesting to me as a lexicographer who cut her teeth on the Third and the defining style of the Third, and this "You are an objective observer of language. You can bring none of your own biases, feelings; you are an editor in a jar, you're a brain in a jar to lexicography." That was the kind of lexicography I was trained in; that's a modern invention, like within the last 80 years. It's a modern invention. And prior to that, dictionaries were a didactic tool for a huge chunk of their existence. The idea that you could bring your own views and biases to a dictionary definition, that was just like, yeah, of course: that's why we're having you write one. People long for the objective, definitive, dispassionate description of what a word means and how to use a word, but that does not actually fit the way that words are used. So how do you, as a lexicographer, try to bridge that gap? But you can't really ever be objective about a thing that you live inside of and that, you know, in which you live and move and have your being. And current lexicography is moving much more in the connotative description side of things that tends to get into the muck of subjectivity.
HZ: Ooh, muck.
KORY STAMPER: Yeah. Muck. The murky swale of subjectivity.
HZ: Speaking of muck: what an exciting digression into the word 'puke'.
KORY STAMPER: I love this story. Puke, that's P-U-K-E, is a colour name – and it is not the colour name that you think it is. ‘Puke’ was used in the 1500s, 1600s, to refer to a reddish brown colour. And it was named after the colour of a fine woollen cloth. And it shows up in Shakespeare. It shows up in one of those great insult pile-ons that you see in, I think it's in Henry IV, Shakespeare talks about ‘puke-stockinged’, which means you're wearing stockings made of this fine woollen cloth. The fine woollen cloth was always this sort of lovely reddish brown colour and puke became associated with that colour, until the word ‘puke’ became applied to effluvia, vomit.
HZ: Fun fact: the first known appearance of puking in the vomit sense is in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. ‘Puke’ the colour of a fine woollen cloth and ‘puke’ from puking are not related words, etymologically. Didn’t help ‘puke’ the colour name though!
KORY STAMPER: Use of ‘puke’ as a colour name dropped way off, because now we're using it to refer to vomit. But the colour name ‘puke’ persisted; it became a different colour. So now if I'm saying "That jacket is coloured like puke," or "That is a puke-coloured jacket," most people are gonna think it's a greenish yellow, it's the colour of bile, because we associate the word puke now more with vomit than we do with this woollen cloth. And so when we use ‘puke’ as a colour name, it is a different colour than it was in the 1600s.
HZ: Democracy in action.
KORY STAMPER: Exactly.
HZ: One colour name that is particularly chaotic in meaning is 'pompadour'. There are rumours that it is so called after Madame de Pompadour, famous for the eponymous hairstyle, and for being Louis XV’s official mistress. It might be easier to get behind the unproven notions that the colour was named for her favourite shade of pink, if ‘pompadour’ was not the name for several different colours – AARGHH!!
KORY STAMPER: You had colour definers who would say, “It’s a green,” and everything in the files would say, “Nope, it's pink.” But the colour expert is saying, “Nope, it's green.”
HZ: What? Help!!
KORY STAMPER: So what is it? Is it pink or is it green?
HZ: Or neither? Is it a third thing? How's this happening?
KORY STAMPER: The colour defining in the Third was really trying to bring it in line with this government standard. And if the government standard said that pompadour was a green and not a pink, well, that's what the standard says.
HZ: That's what turns people libertarian.
KORY STAMPER: That's right. It explains everything. But this is also a period of time in the US where government interference in things was pretty common. This dictionary is being written right after World War II, during McCarthyism, so, you know, the government's poking around and all sorts of stuff. We know retrospectively now that the government was also heavily censoring news about the Korean War and then any incursions into Vietnam. We know during World War II, that the government was also censoring things, because it was important that we not accidentally reveal war plans to the enemy. So government interference in things: it's happening.
There's also a big drive in the government around this time in the 1940s and 1950s for efficiency. So suddenly, if the government's like, “It's more efficient for us to have all of our school buses painted one colour across the whole nation because we just need to source one colour paint, and we just give everyone the formula,” that seems innocuous to most people, so there wasn't a whole lot of concern in the way that there would be now in the government saying, "Well, no, this colour really should be green. Even though all of the fashion people and all of the paint people and all of the paper people say it's pink, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna say it's green."
HZ: You know, hearing it laid out like that makes it seem all the more sinister. They're like, "No, green; and we will persist until you concede."
KORY STAMPER: Right. But what's funny is – so this happens in the 1950s, right? Pompadour is green. If you pull up your phone and do an internet search for "colour chips pompadour" –
HZ: Ok… Yep….
KORY STAMPER: – you will find they are all pink.
HZ: Sorry to tell you: the first one that came up for me, in Encycolorpedia, was a sort of bluish grey.
KORY STAMPER: Oh! Well that's weird.
HZ: Oh god. Never mind.
KORY STAMPER: Yeah. Well, just don't use ‘pompadour’. How about we do that?
HZ: I’ve made it this far without.
KORY STAMPER: No one call any colour ‘pompadour’ ever again.
HZ: A runner that I really enjoyed in the book was you correcting the notion that because certain languages didn't have words that we would recognise as colour words that meant that they couldn't see the colour. Like I remember studying The Odyssey when I was doing ancient Greek at school and the sea is "wine dark" and they're like, oh, they can't see blue, the sea is under the colour of wine.
KORY STAMPER: Right. That's one of the things that's so fascinating to me about how we deal with colour, from a linguistic standpoint: there are different ways to think about linguistic interactions between seeing something, recognising that that thing is that thing, and then naming that thing, but we understand that the word that we name that thing is not the thing itself. I give the example of a raccoon. We know that the word raccoon is not itself a raccoon. But when it comes to colour, we don't do that. We say blue is that thing right there. And if that thing is blue, and you don't call that thing blue, then that doesn't exist.
HZ: Why would we be like that?
KORY STAMPER: Well, we can blame many people for that.
HZ: Cool – as long as there's someone to blame.
KORY STAMPER: So in the 1960s there was a study done by a linguist and an anthropologist, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. If you're a linguist, you know about Berlin and Kay, 1969. They basically did this survey of languages around the world and they categorised which colour names, languages had, and they came up with a rubric that said, okay, this is how colour words evolve as a language evolves. The first colours that every language has are black and white. The third colour is always going to be red. The fourth colour is either going to be blue or green. The fifth colour is going to be whichever one of those it wasn't before. The sixth colour is gonna be yellow. And it keeps going, and I think there's eight levels. And they sort of released this and said, “We can prove, or we can show – our data shows – that this is consistent across all languages in all language families around the globe.”
HZ: They checked all of them?
KORY STAMPER: Oh yeah, they checked, you know, all of them. Now. Berlin and Kay’s initial study, had some massive problems with it, the primary one being that it keys everything to English. English is the normative sample for them. Which, yeah, like: guys, come on. And the way that Berlin and Kay was applied was in a way that was not this, "Oh, this is a really interesting linguistic phenomenon;" it was sort of smashed into ideas of how evolved a people were, how sophisticated a people were. It was very western, Eurocentric.
And this is how you end up then with this idea that if there's not a word in a language that keys exactly to the English word for blue, then the speakers of that language can't see blue, that's why they don't have a word for it. And this is it just, well, it's horseshit. So you brought up Homer and Greek and, you know, the wine dark seas and everyone, oh my God, the ancient Greeks can't see blue. Well, of course they could see blue. They actually had more blue colour terms than we have. It's just, Homer was a poet. He can come up with whatever he wants to come up with when he's talking about the sea. Doesn't mean that he thinks the sea is red.
So it, again, there's this very weird linguistic like brain thing that happens where we think that colour names are the colour themselves. And that's why there's this very weird misapplication of Berlin and Kay, and these very weird like internet things that go around, you see 'em about once every 18 months, “The ancient Greeks can't see blue, the Himba can't see blue, English people couldn't see orange until the 15th century when we got the word for orange.”
HZ: They had yellow-red [geoluread] before! They had it. Ugh.
KORY STAMPER: And other colours too. They had orpiment, which is an orange, like you have all sorts of colours for it.
HZ: Why do you think people really want this to be true?
KORY STAMPER: I think because, well, it comes to other cultures, I think we like to think that we are the normative culture, and we are the sophisticated culture – though I will hasten to add that there are other languages that have more basic colour terms than English, and they certainly don't seem to think that we're all ignorant slobs. Maybe they do.
HZ: They could be laughing behind their hands, and fair enough.
KORY STAMPER: Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. And I wouldn't blame them. So some of it is that. But some of it I think is this idea that language is so powerful that it can actually change the way that you see things. And the thing is is that there's a little bit of truth to that, tiny bit of truth to that. But I think that we just, we want language to be magical. The fact that we have all of these words, so many words that you can combine in any weird grouping, and somehow we all manage to communicate with one another, does seem like magic. So why wouldn't it also change how we see the world around us?
HZ: Sapir Whorf would be delighted.
KORY STAMPER: Yeah, for sure! Yep, for sure.
HZ: They’re out here checking, like "still got it!"
KORY STAMPER: Right, right, right. Exactly. In the linguistic sphere in the 1960s in particular, 1950s and 1960s, there was also a push for universal language, that we had to have some linguistic universals because language is a system, and systems are built on scaffolds and scaffolds have to all look the same. There is this huge body of modern work that sort of pushes us to find the thing behind the thing. And humans love finding the thing behind the thing.
HZ: Kory Stamper is a lexicographer and writer; her new book is True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink. Find her and her work at korystamper.com.
Inadvertently, I have been running a years-long dictionary study in the Allusioverse. Those who sign up to support the show at theallusionist.org/donate get to attend livestreams wherein I read aloud from my large and ever-expanding dictionary collection. We’ve dived into several dozen of them by now, and the project has really shown up how non-objective reference books are – well of course they’re not, because humans wrote them – and reading them aloud somehow really brings out the personalities of the often highly opinionated and frequently grumpy-sounding humans who wrote them, and ther peculiarities and particular proclivities – for example, one lexicographer loves using the word "pudend" so much, when the rest of us have gone our whole lives using the word "pudend" never.
Anyway, join me for this ongoing study, as well as behind the scenes info about every episode, TV and film watchalongs – you’re in time for the back end of season 1 of the very funny Australian murder mystery Deadloch – and the company of the wholesome and supportive Allusioverse Discord community. It’d be nice to have you there, so come aboard at theallusionist.org/donate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
imago, noun: 1. entomology: the final and fully developed adult stage of an insect. 2. Psychoanalysis: an unconscious idealized mental image of someone, which influences a person's behaviour.
Try using ‘imago’ 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 advice were provided by singer and composer Martin Austwick, hear his songs via palebirdmusic.com and Bandcamp – and hear us both on our long-running other podcast Answer Me This.
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