Allusionist 209. Serving C-bomb transcript

May 25, 2025 The Allusionist

Things have changed for a word that despite being around in written text for 900+ years, didn’t even get listed in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1972.

NICOLE HOLLIDAY: I never say this word.

HZ: No, I feel bad to force you.

NICOLE HOLLIDAY: No, it's funny. Well, I'll say it on podcast, this is professional environment; but in my normal daily life, I can't imagine that I would personally say it. And this might just be like, I'm kind of a prude and I was raised kind of religious, but it does sort of seem like beyond the pale for me personally. I wonder if were 20 if I wouldn’t feel that way, but I spent so much of my life like judiciously avoiding very strong taboos. And this one, just my gut reaction is that it overwhelms. So when you asked me to do this, I was like, “Oh, no! I have to say that word!”

HZ: I'm sorry. We could probably skirt around it and then people can spend the whole episode trying to guess which word we're talking about.

Allusionist 199. 199 ideas that I hadn't made into podcasts yet - transcript

August 30, 2024 The Allusionist

This is the 199th episode of the show, and since before this show began, so for nearly a decade, I have been jotting down ideas in two documents - one for short ideas, one for long ideas. There are always more ideas than I have time and ability to make podcasts about, so now the documents are altogether 66 pages long and growing every day. So in this episode, you’re going to hear 199 ideas that I wanted to put into the podcast and haven’t yet.

Allusionist 198. Queer Arab Glossary

August 12, 2024 The Allusionist

HZ: So how do you go about building a glossary when you have to do that yourself from scratch?
MARWAN KAABOUR: Yes, it's a good question. Like, why would a graphic designer with a steady job decide to open this can of worms?

Tranquillusionist: Gay Animals transcript

June 10, 2023 The Allusionist

This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, say a load of words which aren’t really about anything so that your brain gets a little gentle diversion from thinking and/or feeling. This is not a regular episode of the Allusionist where you’re supposed to think and/or feel things. The Tranquillusionist is meant to be a bit dull, and maybe it’ll help you get to sleep or at least turn your existential screaming down to 11.

Today I shall be reading a list of gay animals.

Allusionist 157 Queerbaiting transcript

June 25, 2022 The Allusionist

LEIGH PFEFFER: I think people are a little too quick to ascribe the term ‘queerbaiting’ to anytime they see something that doesn't necessarily sit right with them on instinct. There's a tendency at this point to kind of use it as a synonym for bad representation. I think that there's a disconnect and a mismatch between what younger viewers nowadays are kind of expecting in queer representation versus what pop culture is providing. People are getting used to more representation. They want to see better representation. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about how do we get better representation? What do we call it when we have specific tropes that might lead to harmful stereotypes, instead of lumping everything under this term ‘queerbaiting’ - because if we muddy a term like that, it loses its meaning. We need to be intentional with the language we're using when we're discussing queer representation in media, because we're at a fragile point. We have to have the right language to criticise it.

Allusionist 147 Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 2 transcript

December 7, 2021 The Allusionist

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.

Allusionist 144 Aro Ace transcript

October 26, 2021 The Allusionist

HZ: How did it feel when you found the vocabulary to explain yourself?

LEWIS BROWN: Oh, it was so good. I think it's maybe a bit of a cliche to say, but it was like I'd found a puzzle piece. And I was like, "Oh! That makes sense. Right. Yeah. You know, that checks out." It really helps, I think, to have to have a term for it. Before I had words like aromantic and asexual, I don't know, I just had a bad feeling. When I assumed that I did feel attracted to other people and I was kind of thinking, do I just have some trauma or something? Am I just a selfish person? And these are a cruel things to be thinking about yourself. And then I was like, oh, wait, no, no I don't. I can think of all the ways in which I'm a pretty giving person. I care about the people that I care about quite a lot. Just not necessarily in the way that everyone thinks is the most important way.

Allusionist 118 Survival: Bequest transcript

July 4, 2020 The Allusionist

ELIZABETH KEREKERE: I'm so convinced that transphobia, biphobia, homophobia are such an integral part of colonisation, I reject that as a colonial construct, I reject it as racist.
As they took our land - tried to take all of our land, tried to take all of our language and suppress our culture, they also took our expressions of sexuality and gender. And that is important to us in a core part of our culture, especially because the way that the institutional racism, the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of colonisation has impacted on us and the levels of discrimination against people with diverse genders, sexualities and sex characteristics, that we see that all of this, all of this was a massive attempt to cover up what was already there and pretend it never happened.

Allusionist 117 Many Ways At Once transcript

June 16, 2020 The Allusionist

HARRY JOSEPHINE GILES: Our behaviour and our desires will always exceed any terminology that anyone can come up with. And so rather than trying to find the right terms - and this for me is like what working in, what trying to come up with an LGBT Scots glossary does: it's a chance to imagine. It's a chance not to come up with the right way of saying things, but to say: what if we thought about it this way? What if we thought about it that way? What assumptions are built into the languages that we use?

Allusionist 101. Two or More - transcript

June 24, 2019 The Allusionist

MARK WILKINSON: If you talk about something a certain way for enough time over a sustained period of time then it will likely affect the way people perceive that issue, right? So if something is framed in a certain way over a sustained period of time, you always hear the same words for something, then eventually it frames the way you think about it.

HZ: In this case, he’s been studying the use and framing of the word ‘bisexual’.

MARK WILKINSON: I think bisexual - the word bisexual, and the people as well - the word has had a really rough go of it.

Allusionist 56+12. Joins & Pride - transcript

June 7, 2019 The Allusionist

To celebrate Pride Month, I’m playing two of the Allusionist episodes that have stuck with me the most during the show’s existence.

Allusionist 99. Polari - transcript

May 13, 2019 The Allusionist

HZ: In 1982, Princess Anne, the second child of the Queen of England, Olympic Equestrian, is competing at the Badminton Horse Trials.

PAUL BAKER: She's jumping over all these obstacles and oops, she slips and falls in the water off an obstacle. And all of the photographers rush forward to take a photograph, and she tells them to "naff off". Or "naff orf".
HZ: She's not allowed to drop an F-bomb really, she's a royal.
PAUL BAKER: No, but 'naff' was a Polari word.

HZ: Polari. Just a couple of decades before, it would have been unthinkable that someone like Princess Anne would have used a Polari word, or that she would even have known one.

Allusionist 79. Queer - transcript

June 1, 2018 The Allusionist

AMY SUEYOSHI: I see 'queer' as an umbrella term, as a political call for revolution as well as unity across different groups of people.

JONATHAN VAN NESS: I think of it definitely with positive and loving energy around it, I don’t think of it as an insult at all; growing up, I would have thought of it more as an insult. I think it was in 2015 when we got marriage equality, and the media, especially the LGBTQ+ media, began to use it as an umbrella term, something we could all be part of. So I think I got the cue from media to know that it was a gorgeous amazing word, one where we’re taking the love back and it wasn’t one to be offended by any more.

KATIE MINGLE: I haven’t always loved the term for myself, because it feels like an umbrella term that you can use if you’re gay and in a relationship with someone of the same sex, or you can use if you’re a basically straight couple who occasionally has a threesome with someone. That’s what ‘queer’ has come to mean: anyone who’s not inside the norm.

AMY SUEYOSHI: I think it's rejecting things like patriarchy and heteronormativity, mandates of morality. So not just to be able to keep things gray or to be postmodern, post category, but instead rather to call for a true revolution of the way we see the world, the way we categorize the world. So it's not just about LGBT rights per se but it's about creating a world that's more respectful of equity and thinks about diversity as a plus and values different ideas as a side of radical change rather than fear.

KATIE HERZOG: I sort of hate it. It’s too broad.

TOBIN LOW: It's so useful. I mean especially as there is this proliferation of identities that people can call themselves and identify with and really claim, it's a great way of just sort of acknowledging that it's all in the umbrella and that it's all valid; it's just like a way of acknowledging the validity of all the things, which I think is great.

ERIC MARCUS: This word has tortured me.