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.
Allusionist 93. Gossip - transcript
HZ: A thousand or so years ago, the word ‘gossip’ meant something quite different: a family member. The word broke down to ‘god sibb’, like a godsibling, although then the ‘sibb’ wasn’t necessarily a sibling, was more general, could refer to anyone you were related to. And over the next few hundred years, more specifically, gossips were the close female family and friends who would attend to a woman during labour; she would be sequestered and maybe half a dozen gossips would gather in the room to take care of the mother and help deliver the baby and witness the birth for the purposes of the baby’s baptism - at which these gossips, godsibbs, would be the child’s sponsors. And during these confinements, the women would keep each other company and talk. So you can see how the word would evolve to mean the kind of confidential chat you’d have with someone you’re close to, but by the mid-16th century the word had taken on a bit of a disapproving tone, that the talk was trivial and maybe scurrilous - and female. And these associations persist to this day.
LAINEY LUI: One of my goals as a gossip crusader is to end the pejorative way it's presented in culture, that it's a thing that hens do all around, pecking at each other. It's highly feminized, which is why it's not taken as seriously, when in fact the research shows that we all gossip: it's a human way of communicating.
Read moreAllusionist 86. Name Therapy - transcript
DUANA TAHA: People's issues with the names they choose for their children, and even their own names, are almost never resolved. People don't talk about them. It's the word that you use the most often and the soonest to describe yourself, and yet nobody's really ever talked about how it makes me feel like this.
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