STERLING MARTIN: Growing up, I've always had an interest in science and that's something my family helped nurture. Also just growing up, there weren't many Navajo words in science. Then I went to undergrad at the University of Iowa and my parents were like, "Oh, what are you doing?" And I worked in a research lab, so I could get some bench experience, and just trying to explain to them what I was doing scientifically, I could tell they weren't really catching on to what it meant.
Read moreAllusionist 168 Debuts transcript
HZ: The work that RFSU does has included, over the past three decades, coming up with new terms, to fill gaps in the vocabulary or provide more options for talking about sex and bodies.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Sometimes it's to highlight or make something visible that's not been really talked about. Sometimes it's to change norms in society in some ways, and sometimes it's been sort of a really strategic choice for us in our political work to refuse a certain term or way of describing things, to tell another story, so to speak.
Read moreAllusionist 147 Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 2 transcript
HZ: In 2019, the law changed so that as well as the previously available last name suffixes -son and -dóttir, there was now also a genderfree one, -bur.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Samtökin ’78, the national queer organization, worked with Trans Iceland and Intersex Iceland in forming that legislation that added this suffix to the last names. This specific change to the naming laws that we have - because we do have restrictions on what you can name your children and how you can be named yourself - this happened through a different kind of legislation. So it wasn't really a legislation that was meant to change the name laws. It was just the fact that we added a third gender registration.
HZ: In 2019 the Icelandic government, the Alþingi, unanimously voted to add a third option for legal gender: X, neither male nor female.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Then of course the naming laws had to be updated to suit that need. So that's why -son and -dóttir didn't work anymore, and there had to be added -bur, or the option to just leave son or daughter or child out.
Read moreAllusionist 146 Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 1 transcript
HZ: The Icelandic word for ‘mansplaining’ translates as ‘ramsplaining’. Like the original, it’s a portmanteau, but there’s also a bonus pun in there.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: That's hrútar, ram, and explaining.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: The word for explanation is utskyring. So you add in front of it H and R.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: H R, that’s Mr Explaining.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: It becomes hrutskyring.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Hrutskyring, Mr Explaining, herra utskyring.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Hrútar also means a ram, a male sheep, so in many ways it's a very funny word.
Allusionist 136 Misogynoir transcript
HZ: What to you was the purpose of coming up with a term for misogynoir?
MOYA BAILEY: It's hard to address something if you can't actually name what it is.
Allusionist special: Podcast Podcast transcript
I’m here to talk about a word that a lot of people hate: podcast.
Read moreAllusionist 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 more