Listen to this episode and obtain more information about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/lipread
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, paint language into a corner - I did tell it not to go and stand in the corner while I was painting though, so it's just going to have to wait until the floorboards have dried.
Glad to be back with the first episode of 2024; this podcast just turned nine years old! The best birthday gift for a podcast is if you recommend it to someone who might like it. The other good gift is becoming a member of the Allusioverse at theallusionist.org/donate, where you receive in return regular livestreams where I read from my ever-expanding collection of dictionaries; you get behind the scenes info about the making of every episode; and you get to hang out in the Allusioverse Discord to chat with your peers and together we’re watching the new season of the most wholesome show on television, The Great Pottery Throwdown - and soon we’ll start watching the Canadian version too. Join us at theallusionist.org/donate.
Content note: this episode contains a few Category B swears. It’s also a good time to note that there are transcripts of every episode of the show - go to theallusionist.org/transcripts, or click on the transcripts tab of the website. Also on the website, every episode has its own post, with links to each of the guests, and information about the topics, and links to those transcripts as well. The most recent episodes are also available on Youtube with the transcript as subtitles, find that at youtube.com/allusionistshow.
On with the show.
HZ: How is it easiest for you for me to ask questions? Would you rather I put them in the chat, or ask them like this?
HELEN BARROW: Ask them audibly. If the answer doesn't match the question and if I see the physical expression on your face change, perhaps put it in the chat. It's the speaking naturally, and the not overemphasizing. And the people who go, “I'll just shout.”
HZ: So how does it change things when people over-enunciate because they think that’s helpful? Because that must change the mouth shapes a lot.
HELEN BARROW: It changes the mouth shape, so you are looking for - the consonants, particularly, the ones that are visible, you recognize the lip shapes. Vowels are a bit different, because they will alter with accents. But yes, if you start with “The caaat… saaaat… onnn….” yeah, it's not going to help.
HZ: It looks like your mouth is just flapping in the breeze.
HELEN BARROW: I'm Helen Barrow, I've had lifelong hearing loss, and I am Nottinghamshire's only qualified and active lipreading tutor.
HZ: You’re the only one?
HELEN BARROW: In Nottinghamshire.
HZ: But that’s a big county, for there to be only one of you.
HELEN BARROW: It is.
HZ: Is it an unusual profession to have, then?
HELEN BARROW: I think the word ‘niche’ would spring to mind - even though there are five million ish adults in the UK with a hearing loss, across the spectrum from mild, moderate, all the way through to profound. And people who've now met me before, as I go, “I'm a lipreading tutor,” and they see the words forming of “Oh, you sign?” and the people who know me will start taking three steps back, because they know I will explain.
HZ: The term ‘lipreading’ is really very descriptive, so it is galling that people assume that it is sign language. ‘Lipreading’ could barely be more clear as a term.
HELEN BARROW: Yeah, yeah. The clue is in the name.
HZ: Signing is a whole different language.
HELEN BARROW: it is, it is. I don't sign formally. What I do isn't necessarily visible, unless you pick up that I am concentrated. I might make eye contact, but I'm looking at this bit with a sort of peripheral around the whole body language, which I realized for a podcast of me going, “This is the lips, and this is the bigger body” is perhaps not going to come across.
HZ: Yes, it's a shortcoming of the medium.
HELEN BARROW: But yes, it's lipreading.
HZ: I tried to explain to my husband why lipreading has been in the news recently, and I felt about a thousand years old. Can you explain?
LAINEY LUI: Well, celebrities, of course.
Hi, I'm Lainey Lui. I'm the editor of LaineyGossip.com and The Squawk on Substack and a professional gossip.
HZ: Lainey's an alumsionist - she appeared on the show a few years ago in the episode about the history and importance of gossip. And even if you don’t particularly care about any of the people involved in this latest lipreading gossip story, jog along with us.
LAINEY LUI: So at the Golden Globe Awards, two lipreading incidents - scandales - occurred. The first involved Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, and Taylor Swift's friend Keleigh Teller. So right away, when you have Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift in a story, it's going to be big. These are two of the biggest-name celebrities that we have right now.
Someone was able to record, off-camera from the awards broadcast, a moment in which Selena Gomez runs up to Taylor and Keleigh Teller's table to whisper something. And Keleigh Teller is seen saying, “Timothée? With Timothée?” Question mark. And so everybody was wondering: what was it that Selena told Taylor and Keleigh? Then someone else shared a different camera angle of that moment with no audio, but Taylor can be seen reacting to what Selena told her with a lean-back and an open mouth, which we all recognize to be the reaction that any human being has to being told something super juicy, that you're leaning back with your body and opening your mouth like, “Oh my God, no way!”
The internet became obsessed with what exactly it was that Selena dished. And so the non-professional lipreaders jumped in and deduced that Selena told Taylor that she asked Timothée Chalamet for a photo, and Kylie Jenner, who was with Timothée Chalamet that night, rejected the request. And of course, that relates to beef and celebrities feuding, and that just blew up.
HZ: You've really got to do a lot of studying to keep track of the various beeves involved this.
LAINEY LUI: Yes! Beeves.
HZ: Selena Gomez quickly refuted the detective lipreaders’ interpretations, commenting on Instagram: “Noooooo I told Taylor about two of my friends who hooked up. Not that that’s anyone business.” Then she announced she was taking a break from social media. Then after this online retirement that lasted several hours, she returned to Instagram to post a photo of her and actor Emily Blunt posing with their hands covering their mouths. Why is Emily Blunt involved in this?
LAINEY LUI: On the same night at the Golden Globes, during the arrivals on the red carpet, Emily Blunt arrived with her husband John Krasinski. And at a certain point, cameras caught him saying something to her, and lipreaders, the unprofessional ones on the internet, have decided that what he said to her was, “I can't wait to get a divorce.”
HZ: It's something you would definitely say on the red carpet. It's such a sensible thing to say when you're being watched.
LAINEY LUI: Which is absurd! But again, someone posted that on TikTok, their theory, and that just went wild resulting in widespread speculation that perhaps Emily Blunt and John Krasinski's marriage, which was thought to be solid, might be in a precarious position.
HZ: Incredible that the Golden Globes does so well out of these things.
LAINEY LUI: Listen, the Golden Globes are not prestigious by by any means, but one of the things that makes the Golden Globes fun is that because celebrities are able to sit at tables instead of in an auditorium seating - and they're drinking at the table because, of course, these people don't eat - they get tipsy and they get silly. And it is a good place for gossip generation.
HZ: I suppose also you don't often get to see famous people being friends with each other, except for like going in and out of buildings, but you don't usually get to witness their conversations like this.
LAINEY LUI: Yeah, and also, I think that for anybody who follows celebrity gossip and who's interested in the lives of celebrities, one of the fantasies is to be able to be at a party with them. And that's what the Golden Globes is, is watching them at a party.
HZ: Lipreading-related gossip stories crop up quite often - what were Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez saying to each other while looking cross at the 2023 Grammys? Did Bill Paxton really make that mean quip when another nominee beat him to a Golden Globe in 2010? In 2018, Britain's then-prime minister Theresa May was caught on film - but not audio - supposedly saying angrily to the then-president of the European Commision Jean-Claude Juncker: "What did you call me? You called me nebulous?" And also in 2018, Britain's then leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn had to defend himself against reports that his lips had been spotted calling Theresa May 'stupid'.
HZ: Do media outlets ever hire professional lipreaders to verify this stuff, or even just generate the stories themselves when celebs are on camera?
LAINEY LUI: Oh my god, all the time. All the time. Like, the Daily Mail, I think, is number one for that. I think once a week, I read an article on the Daily Mail that is like, “Professional lipreader decides that King Charles said this to Camilla” or whatever, you know?
HZ: Do you think that's the same as their professional body language expert?
LAINEY LUI: Exactly. Exactly.
HZ: The internet’s not going to fill with spurious nonsense all by itself!
LAINEY LUI: So, yes, there are lipreaders that are hired or consulted all the time by tabloids to figure out what X, Y, Z royal or celebrity said to another celebrity.
HZ: In sport, too, lipreaders analyse what players were saying to each other. Or shouting at each other.
HELEN BARROW: And they used to just bleep, didn't they? If the footballers went, words to the effect of, “Dear ref, I don't agree with your decision,” they would bleep it out. And then people realised they could lipread what they were saying, of those short words with not many syllables, and some of the lip shapes quite obvious; so now they pixelate it, don't they? But, you also pick up that body language, don't you? You can see it in the body language of, “Dear ref, I don't quite agree with your decision.”
HZ: In 2018, lipreaders helped to determine that spectators had shouted racist abuse at football player Raheem Sterling - as a result of which, one of the spectators was banned for life from Chelsea Football Club. In 2012, the footballer John Terry was found not guilty of racial abuse in a criminal case, because lipreaders can’t confirm the tone in which he said the things, or whether he said them as a quotation or question. Lipreaders are also hired by police and lawyers to try to see what someone said, for example, on CCTV footage. But Helen Barrow does not provide testimony in legal cases, or to the media.
HELEN BARROW: No. And it goes back to the policy of my professional association, ATLA, is that we don't interpret. And yes, you will see in the press, ‘expert lipreader’. There are those who wish to do it; me personally, and my professional association: no.
HZ: The Association of Teachers of Lipreading to Adults states that it will turn down requests to provide interpreters, for several reasons including:
Lipreading used in this way could be used to sensationalise events and trivialise the difficulties involved in skilful lipreading.
Evidence involving lipreading is unlikely to be accepted in a Court of Law.
Lipreading such videos / DVDs may constitute an invasion of privacy of the person being lipread. Using listening devices (bugs) to record conversations is unlawful without a court order: lipreading duplicates this concept through an alternative medium.
The difficulties inherent in lipreading – e.g. lipreading is phonetic and, as such, a lot of words look very similar; also there is a need for context and subject clues - accuracy cannot be guaranteed. There is no accreditation or formal test for lipreading accuracy.
HELEN BARROW: There are so many factors that can influence what it is, and so many words that can look alike, that if you don't have the context, you won't know the difference. It won't really work on a podcast, but I can do it if you want to.
HZ: Yes please.
HELEN BARROW: If you want me to do a quick demo, I will give you three words then, totally without context. Okay? [She mouths three words.]
HZ: Well, it looked like you were saying, “baa, baa, baa,” but that, I assume, is not what you were saying.
HELEN BARROW: That wasn't what I was saying, no.
HZ: What were you saying?
HELEN BARROW: So you've got the right one in that you've got the B. Yeah? So one of them was a B. So if I give you some context then, if I tell you one was a furry animal, one can be a civic leader, and one can be a piece of fruit. Okay, right, I'll do it again. [She mouths the same three words again.]
HZ: …I'm bad at this.
HELEN BARROW: But the thing is, I have deliberately picked three words that I know look alike, because, to go into the technical side of it, consonant confusion group, you know, a set of lip shapes that look alike.
HZ: Homophenes is the term for words that sound different but look the same on the lips, and visemes are the sounds in speech that look the same when lipread. There are more phonemes than there are visemes, so quite a lot of things that sound different look the same.
HELEN BARROW: The letters buh, puh, muh look alike without sound. In the context of you're looking at a word without voice or a letter, buh, puh and muh, the lips come together in a neutral lip shape and I've picked the same vowel at the end.
HZ: What were you saying?
HELEN BARROW: So I had got bear, pear, mare.
HZ: Incredible.
HELEN BARROW: But bear again: you think about the spellings in the English language. I said it was a furry animal [bear]; bare spelt b a r e: a tree is bare of its leaves. A pear, piece of fruit, equally, two of something [pair], will look exactly alike. Mare could be a horse, but equally it could be [mayor] a civic leader. So if you look at that, of what appeared to be that one word, and how many different definitions you can get from that: if you've got no context, which word is it? And how confident would you be you've got the right one? So that's probably why I personally, and the professional decision is, we don't do interpretation. Yes, if the topic is orchards and you're looking at fruit in an orchard, then yes, you probably go, “It'll be apples, it'll be pears,” that kind of thing. But if it's an orchard somewhere where there's six-foot furry animals around, if that's possible.
HZ: Yeah, could be a bear or a female horse.
HELEN BARROW: Yeah. So, just look at it, look at it on the face of it; how do you work out what it is? What else are you putting around it?
HZ: What other easily mixed-up sounds are there? Or things that are just very difficult to ascertain?
HELEN BARROW: There are, uh, in the, in the consonant consonant confusion groups, there are about 12. So buh, puh and muh is one set, but you can see the buh, puh and muh; one that's not as visible is tuh, duh and nuh. So if you do a tuh, duh and nuh, what's visible on that? And think about where the tongue is when you do that, the tongue's on the ridge of your back of your front teeth. And you think how many tuh, duhs and nuhs there are in words.
HZ: Yes, very commonly occurring letters.
HELEN BARROW: Yeah! But TH is different. If you think about ‘th’, then you will see the tongue come forward on that. So a TH is different. Again, different ways of saying th. What else have we got? Thuh and vuh, so very recognizable lip shape in the top teeth, touch the bottom lip. But again, fine and vine will look exactly alike. Fat and vat. Quh and wuh, so you get a rounded lip shape. But you've then got a group of sh, ch, j, and a zh, which is in words like ‘measure’ that all have, again, a rounded lip shape. But then if you look at something like gin, spelled with a G but said with a J: again, confusion reigns.
HZ: Confusion reigns. It often reigns in all forms of language.
HELEN BARROW: Yes. Oh, yes. See, I mean, yes, I only teach in English, but I am quite sure there are many, many other languages where you get similar kinds of issues and shapes and how they're said, and words that will look alike.
HZ: Yes. I wonder which language is the easiest, and which ones are the most difficult to lipread.
How different is the skill of lipreading depending on which sort of accents you're dealing with, you know, if someone is from the US, is British-accented lipreading going to be accurate enough for them?
HELEN BARROW: I think it's, you get to know people and you get to know how they speak, how they construct their sentences. And in some ways, the States is no different to somebody who lives in Scotland, lives in Wales, and you've probably listened to my accent, which does have a hint of broad Nottingham. And my students, and particularly when we get a bit of a north-south divide in the UK - they're buses where I am, those long things that carry lots of people, but it's a very flat U, and they will pick that out. But speaking naturally, you get used to it.
So the people you see regularly, you will get used to that, you will get used to how they speak; so it's probably a lot easier, people that you know. But it's not only the accent, the sentence construction: what's the commonality that you've got with that person? What are they likely to talk to you about? The diversity of the language, you don't have to go far to get differences, but you're looking at that lip shape, you're looking at the sentence, and going, “I've lipread this, it doesn't make sense.” And the brain is going, "Right, what else could it be?" And then, you know, whether you ask a closed question of, “Did you say X?” At which point you will hopefully get, again, a body language, a yes or a no. There again, culturally across the continents, a nod of the head isn't always yes. So yeah, the language of it is fascinating.
HZ: And when people have beards, does that complicate things?
HELEN BARROW: I had a contract of employment in the 1980s that was very specific that “gentlemen must have neatly trimmed facial hair” to work for the organization - and I have been known to quote, and yes, it does make a difference because you don't see the nuances of what's being said, and it can be quite difficult. And whether they can help you with that, speak clearer, look at the whole the tools and techniques around it. At least if they're looking at you, you're in a quiet environment and try and put all the mitigating factors in that you can, then hopefully you can sort it out.
HZ: How accurate is lipreading, if all the circumstances are ideal? You've got a neatly trimmed beard; you've got good sight lines for someone's face: how accurate is lipreading?
HELEN BARROW: I think if you read the professional texts around it, it's somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the English language is visible on the lips. So the rest of it you are putting together. In the classes that we will do this evening, you will ask people to give a context before they speak without voice. So actually within a class, you turn your voice off and make it as quiet or as sound-free as possible, but you've set that context. So it may be that you can pick up those keywords from it, and work out. And depending on the words, depending on the subject, you can look at some sentences and go, “100 percent, spot on.” You can look at another sentence five minutes later and go, “Not a clue,” or you've got two or three words from it. In the way that we are looking at the lipreading, you're not necessarily going to get every word in a sentence. Your core is: what's the gist of it - what's that person telling me, asking me? - and put it together. But all the little joining words that we would say in spoken English, yes, are in there, but do you clock every one of them?
HZ: Ethically, where do you stand on reading the lips of someone who is not in conversation with you? Maybe they're across a cafe, but you can see them clearly. Would you have a little look, or would you think “Nah”?
HELEN BARROW: Technically, distance-wise, you would probably have a job to do it. The optimal distance would be three feet away. But the further away, you're not going to see it as clearly. And again: would you know the context? And if I'm out eating with somebody or, you know, I'm with somebody else, it's part of the fact it's rude, you know, you're not talking to the person that you're with.
HZ: It’s just a different form of eavesdropping.
HELEN BARROW: Yeah, I mean, there's a series of detective novels, of a lady who lipreads to solve crimes. “Oh yeah, 30, 40 feet away, knows exactly what they say! Ooh, I've solved the crime!” Brilliant set of books and short stories to read. Practical implementation, realistically: no.
HZ: Those are the Judith Lee stories by Richard Marsh. Lipreading from across a room is quite a popular trope in detective stories. There’s The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn by Colin Dexter, who was himself deaf, and he created the character Inspector Morse - who goes to a lipreading class as part of his murder investigation, and thus learns how two words may have looked alike to the deaf titular character Nicholas Quinn. I asked Caroline Crampton of Shedunnit podcast about lipreading in Golden Age detective fiction and she mentioned The Listening Eye by Patricia Wentworth, which I’ve just started reading and in fact tore myself away from the book to make this show. In both of those novels, the lipreading character is not the detective; but there’s also the author Sue Thomas - her work as a lipreader for the FBI was the basis for the TV series Sue Thomas F.B.Eye - that’s wordplay, eye as in ocular eye.
Meanwhile, the amateur detectives providing their lipreading interpretations of video clips of celebrities like Selena Gomez: well, it’s hard to prove that they are definitely right, but also hard to prove that they are definitely wrong.
LAINEY LUI: Exactly. Stories like these never come to a conclusion, because no one is going to tell us, out of all the parties involved, what exactly they were talking about. They can't! They can't, because clearly someone was talking shit, you know? And they're not gonna go on record and say who they were talking shit about. So we'll never really fully get a period full stop, bow tie conclusion, we can move on. So that means that the conversation is ongoing. It continues. It has immortality, so to speak. And that's part of it's the intoxicating factor of it where it won't end if we don't have to let it end. And we won't let it end; there's no series finale.
HZ: It's quite nice that it's not about something really bleak.
LAINEY LUI: Yeah, this is low stakes, right?
HZ: It's so weird though that this has been so big when it's about nothing happening, fundamentally. Nothing happened, and it is about the absence of anything happening. Do you have any favourite gossip stories that have come out of lipreading?
LAINEY LUI: I can’t think of any, off the top of my head. And here's why. I don't think I have, as a professional gossip, catalogued and committed lipreading incidents to memory. And I have to say I have a photographic… if I could remember like physics principles, the way I can remember celebrity gossip details, I actually probably would work for NASA. Anyway, my point is, I haven't catalogued it, and therefore committed it to memory, because I don't consider it a legitimate source. The same way I don't consider - and we shouldn't consider - like body language a legitimate source. It happens all the time, right? We see a picture of two celebrities. And one happens to be making a face and it's like, “They're in a fight! They're about to break up!” And wouldn't you know, they were just in the middle of sneezing or something like that.
And so I feel the same way about lipreading, because it's not a science. It's not super accurate. And so I take a really purist, almost sanctimonious gossip perspective to this, because it actually makes me angry, that lipreading will become like a form of sourcing, and its own story generator, when it's a nothingburger. With the John Krasinski and Emily Blunt thing, legitimate headlines were created, many, many of them, that read: “John Krasinski and Emily Blunt are on the rocks.” And that's on the internet forever. So, if you are just coming into this situation and learning about the relationship between John and Emily, part of your research would involve, “Oh yeah, in January of 2024, their relationship hit a speed bump when they were seen at the Golden Globes.” And that becomes record, you know what I mean?
And so as a purist, I don't want to commit lipreading scandals to memory, and I don't want that to become on record, because it's legitimizing something that shouldn't be legitimized. This has become something I'm really passionate about, and I don't know if your listeners are just going to be rolling their eyes because they're gonna be like, “Oh, what is this girl saying? The ‘legitimacy’ of gossip.” But I do equate it to media and news in general, the same thing is happening with quote unquote, “real news”: true things are being uttered at the same time as untrue things, and people are losing the ability to tell the difference.
HZ: But narratives are always irresistibly attractive to people.
LAINEY LUI: Especially in the case of John Krasinski and Emily Blunt. They were just minding their own business going to an award show together, and suddenly an amateur lipreader is like, “Um, I think he said this to her!” And then what got even more out of hand is that the following night or two nights later she attended another event and he wasn't there - which is normal like your husband can't come to work with you every day. And then people were like, “This adds fuel to the fire!”
HZ: Oh god!
LAINEY LUI: And so, for me, as an entertainment reporter and a culture critic, I care very deeply about what is put out there as real gossip, and what is put, and what is bullshit, like, and what is just bad gossip?
HZ: The celebs will start wearing welding masks to events so you can’t lipread any more.
LAINEY LUI: I know, right? And I think that there are a few celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio who continues to wear masks.
HZ: Oh, not for epidemiological reasons?
LAINEY LUI: COVID brought about this thing where it became commonplace in society across the world to see people in masks. Prior to COVID, for the most part, it was like Asian travellers, right? Because masks are quite commonplace in Asian countries, East Asian countries in particular. So you'd go to the East and for years and years, ever since 2003 SARS, actually, masks were very commonplace in Asia. But when Asians travelled to the West, people would look at them funny when they wore masks. Now, post-COVID, it's very common. So with celebrities, it's become one of those things where, hey, if the paparazzi are around, or Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't want to add value to any of his paparazzi photos, he'll slap on a mask. So, you're right. Now that lipreading has become a obsession, will we see more celebrities again wearing masks all over the place?
HZ: Or big beards.
LAINEY LUI: Sure.
HZ: There's options.
LAINEY LUI: Maybe that's what publicists should be telling their clients: grow a beard, or wear a mask.
HZ: Maybe veils will come back as daywear. You’ve written about how these gossip stories have already been so commonplace in Asia that people will cover their mouths while talking in public.
LAINEY LUI: Yeah. There are also lots and lots of award shows, in Korea, in Japan, in China; and for a long time now, when celebrities are sitting in their seats at those award shows, they'll be seated next to another celebrity, they will cover their mouths, because social media activity and toxicity and speculation is so out of control in the East. And so, yeah, celebrities have been doing this for a while, because there has been like so much social media drama over lipreading, and what people think they may have said to somebody else, that has affected careers. And especially in China where censorship is such a problem, and celebrities are even more beholden to social media and fan activity than they are here, and they're also monitored by the governmental agencies: celebrities have to be so careful. One seemingly harmless thing can lead to the abrupt conclusion of a career in China.
HZ: So cancel culture is real, just not in the West.
LAINEY LUI: That's right. It's a myth in the West for sure. It is not a myth in the East.
HZ: But if you were a celebrity in the West and you wanted to get attention and to stir the pot, you could just stand in the middle of a well-covered event, just mouthing something, and see what happens.
LAINEY LUI: Yes, if anybody is out there is smart and they want to engineer, self-engineer a viral moment so that they became famous or even more famous, they would self-create a lipreading scandal.
HZ: Today you heard from Lainey Lui and Helen Barrow.
Helen Barrow teaches lipreading classes and hearing loss management workshops, online and in person; find out more, and you can sign up for classes, all at her website, lipreading.me.uk.
And Lainey Lui is the gossip maven from LaineyGossip.com and The Squawk on Substack; read both for analysis of gossip, and more importantly the education in media intelligence.
LAINEY LUI: I got a lot of things off my chest. Thank you.
HZ: Oh, you're welcome. I'll send you a bill for the therapy.
If you want a bit more of me replacing your interior monologue temporarily, I appear on a recent episode of the fun pop culture podcast Pop This!, talking about the truly befuddling film Duets from the year 2000; it’s about karaoke contests across the US and starring Paul Giametti, Andre Braugher and Gwyneth Paltrow - it was the final film directed by her father Bruce Paltrow. And it is not a film I would recommend! But I do absolutely recommend this podcast. Find Pop This! in the podplaces.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
“Blunge” - how fun is that to say!
blunge, verb: mix (clay or other materials) with water in a revolving apparatus, for use in ceramics.
Derivatives: blunger, noun.
Origin 19th century: blend of blend and plunge.
Oh my god, it’s a portmanteau! What a blessed day.
Try using ‘blunge’ 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. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Thanks to Tracey Burch of the Association of Teachers of Lipreading to Adults. Also thanks to the literary detective listeners of Shedunnit podcast.
Our ad partner is Multitude. Ad spots are now available for 2024. If you would like me to talk winningly and affectionally about your product or thing, a fresh script every time, contact Multitude at multitude.productions/ads.
Find @allusionistshow on the social networks. And you can hear or read every episode, find links to more information about the topics and people therein, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
