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 208. Four Letter Words: Ffff

May 11, 2025 The Allusionist

If you’re thinking, “How the fuck can you write a whole 500-page dictionary just about the word ‘fuck’?” consider, say, the many meanings of ‘ass fuck’, noun and verb - and that’s before you even add similar terms like ‘bumfuck’ and ‘buttfuck’. And there are so many less usual terms, like ‘fucksome’ or ‘fuckstrated’ or ‘fuckist’ or ‘fucktious’.

Allusionist 207. Randomly Selected Words from the Dictionary

January 17, 2025 The Allusionist

Today’s episode is in the Tranquillusionist style, to give your brain a break while I say words that are not too consequential over a soothing backing track. And this time, the words are all the randomly selected words from the dictionary from every episode of the show, in reverse chronological order.

Allusionist 201. Singlish transcript

October 10, 2024 The Allusionist

BIBEK GURUNG: You grow up with the sense that if your first language, or one of your first languages, Singlish, actually a bad version of an already existing language, you kind of get this sense that “I'm just bad at language,” which is… language is a fundamental human skill. It's what separates us from the lemurs or whatever. And to just have this sense that you're bad at this very fundamental skill, I think, really does a number to your self esteem and your abilities to communicate in general. I still have a lot of - I don't know how to phrase it, maybe like cultural cringe - around Singlish. And when I meet someone from Singapore, we do sort of lapse into Singlish and communicate in that way, except if I'm with American friends and then I just feel so self conscious and I'm not able to do it. As a student of linguistics and someone who just knows about the sociolinguistic dynamics, I still find it really hard to shake.

Tranquillusionist: Ex-Constellations transcript

September 26, 2024 The Allusionist

Let’s hear it for some of the constellations that we used to have but are now ex-constellations.

Allusionist 200. 200th episode celebratory quiz! transcript

September 13, 2024 The Allusionist

Here it is, the 200th episode of the Allusionist! To celebrate, here is a playalong quiz where the questions have been set by you, the smart listeners, and if you want to play as you listen, you can keep track of your scores via the score sheet at theallusionist.org/200, if you don’t have to hand the back of an envelope and a pencil you stole from IKEA.

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?

Allusionist 197. Word Play part 7: Word Sport

June 29, 2024 The Allusionist

Unleash the bees!

Allusionist 196. Word Play part 6: Beeing

June 10, 2024 The Allusionist

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 191 Hypochondria - transcript

March 23, 2024 The Allusionist

CAROLINE CRAMPTON: A lot of the theoretical material that I'd read about hypochondria very much positioned it in this binary situation that either someone has, quote, real illness, i.e. illness that you can detect with a scan or a blood test or some other diagnostic tool, or "It's all in their head and it's made up," and those are the only two ways it can be. But, just personally, I feel like I'm pretty much constantly experiencing some combination of the two. And I think the idea that there is unwarranted fear: I don't think there is any such thing as unwarranted fear, to be honest.

Allusionist 187 Bonus 2023 transcript

December 24, 2023 The Allusionist

It is the annual Bonus episode - because the people who appear on this show always say so much good stuff, it doesn’t all fit into their original episodes, so at the end of each year we get to enjoy all the extra bounty. Coming up, we’ve got a mythical disappearing island, geese, human dictionaries, the dubious history of the Body Mass Index, a Eurovision thing that has puzzled me for years, Victorian death department stores, and much more.

Allusionist 186 Ravels transcript

December 12, 2023 The Allusionist

MIRIAM FELTON: No; I think, as with most of these things, they're just named after people. The people themselves don't really have much association with it. Like the Earl of Cardigan didn't ever wear a cardigan as far as we know.
HZ: What? What?? I assumed that he was out there on the battlefields in a cardigan.
MIRIAM FELTON: Like a nice fair isle one with all the stranded colour work? That would have been awesome.
HZ: Just some kind of frontally divided knitted garment. But no?
MIRIAM FELTON: No.
HZ: What?!
MIRIAM FELTON: Not as far as we have any evidence.

Allusionist 185 Gems and Patties transcript

November 21, 2023 The Allusionist

I've got a doctorate in this, and I have got dwarfism, but there'll always be an average-sized person whose only recollection of dwarfism is through Snow White, and yet somehow they'll construct themselves as the expert, and tell you it's not offensive or, “No, you've got that wrong.”

HZ: Also by having it on bags of sweets, that's kind of the ultimate “It's okay to say this in normal conversation”.

ERIN PRITCHARD: Yeah. But you do get through to some people, some people go, “I never realised that. I never knew that.”

Allusionist 184 Misophonia transcript

November 6, 2023 The Allusionist

JANE GREGORY: Misophonia is an extreme reaction to certain sounds and not an aversion to all sounds, but an extreme reaction to specific sounds. And the most common sounds are eating and heavy breathing and kind of repetitive sniffing and coughing and things like that. Which are also sounds that most people don't like the sound of, but people with misophonia will get a much more intense reaction, so it might be more like a fight or flight kind of response, a feeling of anger or panic as opposed to feeling annoyed or irritated or disgusted by the sound. And there's a bit more to it in terms of what goes on around the sounds as well. So it might be feeling trapped or helpless when they can't get away from these sounds. It might be listening out for sounds, even when there aren't any, or continuing to listen to see if the sound is still going, even if it's stopped. And doing things to organize your life around sounds or to cope with sounds. when they happen. So most people who don't like a sound will just deal with it. For people with misophonia, they have to do things to not be able to hear it or to be able to cope with their reactions to it.
HZ: Rather than just grimacing.
JANE GREGORY: Exactly. I mean, there's also some grimacing, but probably also some glaring.