Unleash the bees!
Read moreAllusionist 196. Word Play part 6: Beeing
DEV SHAH: Spelling is about roots, language. I genuinely loved getting a word I didn't know and having all this information - it was like a detective case: you have the language of origin, the definition, alternate pronunciations, roots; it's like witnesses and having details to a crime scene, forensics. And, you know, it was just me piecing out together, doing what I love, in front of millions of people, shining on a stage, cameras, and still getting a lot from it.
HZ: And you got to do all that detective work in ninety seconds.
DEV SHAH: Exactly.
Allusionist 159 Bufflusionist transcript
HZ: ‘Vampyre’ with a Y was pretty interchangeable with ‘vampire’ with an I when it first landed in English. Actually, I think the first appearance in English was with a Y. We probably got it from French or German, but it was based on - it’s a little unclear, but it was based on Hungarian, possibly, or Slavic languages. And it was because, at the time, they were doing a lot of coverage of the Serbian vampire epidemic of 1725 to 1732.
JENNY OWEN YOUNGS: Oh, of course.
HZ: Apparently there were a lot of Eastern European vampire epidemics.
KRISTIN RUSSO: What is a vampire epidemic?
HZ: I assume an epidemic of vampires. Imagine Covid, but for vampirism. And no vaccine. No masking is going to save you.
Allusionist 95. Verisimilitude - transcript
HZ: Approximately how many languages have you invented at this point?
DAVID PETERSON: I think I've invented over 50 languages at this point. Not all of them are very large in terms of vocabulary size, and not all of them are very good. I had created about 17 before I ever started working on Game of Thrones.
HZ: The languages you hear in Game of Thrones: Dothraki -
[CLIP] Khal Drogo: “Moon of my life, are you hurt?”
HZ - the various dialects of Valyrian:
CLIP: Daenerys: “Valyrian is my mother tongue.”
HZ: - those aren’t the actors making up some gibberish. Those are functional languages, with large vocabularies and complex grammars and etymologies.
Read moreAllusionist 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 89. WPM - transcript
The Guinness world record for typing speed was held by the late Barbara Blackburn. There are two kinds of typing contests: sprints, and marathons. And Barbara was a champion of both: During minute-long speed tests, Barbara could type up to 170 wpm on typewriter or, on a computer, 212 words per minute.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: 212 words per minute
HZ: And in endurance tests she could type 150wpm for 50 minutes.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: 150 words per minute, for 50 minutes
HZ: To show off her world record-breaking achievement, in 1985 Barbara was invited onto the David Letterman show, to race against the fastest typist on Letterman show staff - also called Barbara. But Barbara Blackburn sabotaged the contest.
Read moreAllusionist 80. Warm Front - transcript
NATE BYRNE: One of the things I find really strange when it comes to the weather is that we're all experts and all idiots at the same time.
HZ: You’re supposed to be the expert though.
NATE BYRNE: Right. Yeah! But I mean, we all live in it every day and we all feel like we understand the weather really well and we hear weather reports every single day. Now, if you are practicing a skill every day, on average you're generally excellent at it; that’s a real strength of yours. But it turns out that meteorologists typically haven't been very good at telling people what it is they're trying to tell them. So showers, just for example, means the rain's going to start and stop and start and stop; it doesn't tell you anything about the volume. Rain means it's just going to be continuous, and again doesn't tell you anything about the volume; but we have built, somehow, cultural expectations and understandings that go with those words that the scientists don't actually mean when they're using those words and it makes a really tricky job.