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This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, try to return language to where I bought it but turns out there are no refunds.
A while ago I asked for your language questions and etymology requests, then I put some of them to wise alumsionists – then I got waylaid by Draculae and four-letter words and all sorts, but here we have their answers to a few of your questions, about petty linguistics, and terms for yourself with regard to sexuality or what you eat. Sorry if we didn’t get to your question – more to come.
Couple of bits of news:
1. I make a tiny cameo in our podpals’ Switched On Pop’s new Netflix show, I pipe up to explain the etymology of ‘chorus’.
2. Owing to the caprices of making a living as a professional podcaster in These Times, for the first time in the show’s nearly twelve years of existence, I’ve had to switch on dynamic ads, as they are known in the trade. That’s the kind of ads that is not written and voiced by me, and I’ve always tried to be picky about which brands I’ve advertised on the show – I’ve never done pharmaceuticals, cars, gambling, an investment bank was once offering quite a lot of money for me to nicewash them – but with the dynamics now I won’t even know what the ads are for, so if you hear an ad for something and think, “That would not pass the Zaltzman smell test,” contact me via theallusionist.org/contact and I’ll make sure that brand gets blocked. Thank you in advance for snitching.
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On with the show.
HZ: A couple of episodes ago in the Lingthusionist, we got to hang out with linguist Lauren Gawne, cohost of the podcast Lingthusiasm. And here she is again:
HZ: I had a question from a listener named Heather, Lauren, that I would like to put to you. Heather says: “If you had the power to change one thing about the English language exclusively for low stakes reasons such as pettiness, vibes, or aesthetics, what would you change?”
LAUREN GAWNE: That is a great question, and I think, if I had to change something in English, I would really just like to give the pronoun system a little bit of a zhoozh, because there's a thing that happens where we have a we form, we just have one ‘we’. “We're gonna go grab a coffee,” and it's very hard in English to figure out, if someone says that “we're gonna go grab a coffee,” it's very hard to know if that includes you or not.
Other languages have this solved, they have inclusive and exclusive we, and so they use a different form of we for “we are getting coffee. All of us – you're included, you are coming along.” It's implicit in that form. Or, “we're getting a coffee. You are obviously not coming because you've got a giant coffee in your hand right now.” And I just think it could solve a lot of social interactional awkwardness if English fixed that particular part of the pronoun system.
HZ: Yeah, I think there's a lot of English pronounage that could use a significant overhaul. Listen to my episode called No Title for more about that. But I'm very happy to add we to that pile of chores.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yeah. I mean, the whole system is a bit of a mess, but I feel like this is, like, if we're talking about –
HZ: Low stakes.
LAUREN GAWNE: – low stakes pettiness, there's plenty of other bits that need to be fixed up for much more high stakes reasons. But in terms of low stakes, just those moments of social awkwardness, then I think that's, that's probably on the top of my candidate list.
HZ: Yeah. And you know, for those of us who have rejection sensitivity and also just don't really want to impose on people where we're not like explicitly invited like vampires, I think this is a very important conundrum that you've raised.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yep.
HZ: Alex Ketchum appeared on the episode Bread and Roses, and Coffee, as well as Bonus 2025, talking about the heyday of feminist coffee houses and restaurants in the 1970s and 1980s and the language they used for themselves and their food.
HZ: Heather says: “If you had the power to change one thing about the English language exclusively for low stakes reasons such as pettiness vibes or aesthetics, what would you change?”
ALEX KETCHUM: One thing... Hmm. I think I would make it that society wouldn't be so judgemental about stalling words: words such as ‘like’ or ‘um’. I think that we would have more social acceptance of those words and actually a regard to how they're built into different subcultures, vocabularies, and that it wasn't seen as something to be judged.
HZ: It's very you to use your vote for the greater good.
ALEX KETCHUM: Thanks. I think there's also a bit of a selfishness too – when I've listened back to recordings that I'm thinking, “oh no, I'm saying like every fifth word when I'm trying to think of something.” And I had a former professor who, anytime I used the word, like she said, “stop” and made me say it again. And I had taken it out of my vocabulary; but as I've relaxed back into myself a bit more as a human being, I've noticed the resurgence, and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, it's just a thing.
HZ: It’s so useful, especially for reported speech. I haven't figured out a replacement in that context, so I'm going with it, I suppose.
ALEX KETCHUM: Yes. So I guess that's my vote.
HZ: Let us have words while our brain is buying time.
ALEX KETCHUM: Exactly, exactly. You can't always take a sip of water.
HZ: My dad was a very funny man and he had quite a laid back delivery, and sometimes he would do a sort of musical humming sound while he was thinking of a punchline. So he'd do the setup and then be like, “hmmmmmmmmm” – and then bam.
ALEX KETCHUM: Okay. I like that technique.
HZ: It’s an option.
HZ: Lexicographer and writer Kory Stamper appeared on the Hues episode of the show this year, to talk about how difficult it is to define colours in dictionaries. I put Heather’s question to her too.
KORY STAMPER: Ooh. Hmm… What would I change? I think I would require the use of ‘moist’ more often. I would create compound adjectives out of moist, so we've got moistful, or moisty; I would resurrect the verb moistify… Mostly because I think, you know, people, that's one of those words, right? You say, “I write dictionaries,” and people go, “Oh!” and then they immediately tell you all the words they hate. And ‘moist’ is always at the top of the list. “Oh, I hate moist. It's so gross.” And like, if you wanna go find the studies that have been written on why people don't like the combination of sounds that result in the word moist, you can; but I just think sometimes moist is the word you need to use.
And so just to be petty, I would just make it a more prominent word. I would make it more word. More word, more moist, moistful.
HZ: Maybe that would help people confront their prejudices about moisture.
KORY STAMPER: Maybe. Or maybe it would just make people angrier. People would take up yoga more.
HZ: Well, you just simply can't control what makes people take up yoga. So moistitude could be it.
KORY STAMPER: Ooh, moistitude. Oh, lovely. Alright. I'll add that to the list.
HZ: Yeah. You've got the power.
KORY STAMPER: Yeah, let's do it.
HZ: Lauren Gawne had another answer to Heather’s question:
LAUREN GAWNE: The other one that's probably high on my list would be that English speakers are not very good at marking where information has come from,
HZ: What, like footnotes?
LAUREN GAWNE: Essentially. So, the Tibetan languages that I work with have a system called evidentiality, of marking where you know something from, and so you have to distinguish between – in these languages, there's different ways of doing it in different languages – you have to distinguish between “I saw it” or “I heard it directly,” “I know it just 'cause it's long held information,” or, “I know it 'cause someone told me.” And I just feel like it would be a lot easier to say, "They're all going to get coffee; I saw them leave directly," or "they're all going to get coffee, someone said – I don't know, I didn't see them go out with their reusable cups, just someone else in the office told me they're gonna get coffee." And again, I think a lot of the time I wish I knew whether someone was telling me gossip that they directly saw or that they're just reporting as like secondhand fact. I really feel like that would make my ability to judge the utility of that gossip a lot better.
HZ: I think you've got the makings of a detective drama featuring people from different language cultures navigating the misunderstandings arising from this lack in English specifically.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yes. I do have to stress that people who speak languages that have grammatical evidentially, which is like a quarter of the world's languages appear to have this kind of marking in some form. So it's not like it's an obscure feature, it's just that those 25% are usually not in the more largely spoken languages. It's a very common phenomenon. But also I do have to stress, for those of you who are immediately opening a blank word document and starting this detective fiction –
HZ: Please!
LAUREN GAWNE: – I do have to stress that you can lie about the evidential status of something.
HZ: Okay.
LAUREN GAWNE: So it is not like it's ungrammatical to use the wrong form. I have examples of this in the grammar; I have examples of this from my social life, where people would just make up… I was at a wedding once and one of the ladies leaned over and was like, “Oh yeah. She said she'll have alcohol. She'll have a drink.” I was just like, “Hmm. I definitely did not say that. And you know that I normally don't drink. And you are absolutely putting words in my mouth.” I mean, that is not at the level of like red herrings and a murder.
HZ: Well, it's a third act twist.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yeah, it is absolutely possible to lie. There you go. You've already got it plotted out.
HZ: Oh yeah, I'm excited for this.
LAUREN GAWNE: Yeah.
ALEX KETCHUM: I'm just wondering if you have an answer to the question.
HZ: Oh my god, so many. You know what? I would just get rid of all – I mean it's not really petty or vibes or aesthetics. I would just make all the language gender neutral. So like one pronoun; get rid of titles; but I've been on that horse for years.
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, that would definitely simplify things.
HZ: And I think also I would get rid of the two different spellings of practise and practise. I think we should just choose a C or an S and free up that little bit of brain space where people are like, “Which one? Which one do I use?”
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah. Yeah. Spelling differences.
HZ: Yeah. Minor spelling differences.
HZ: I have a lot more answers to Heather’s question, but let’s not get bogged down with my gripes - onto more pressing linguistic matters. Among the things Alex Ketchum’s academic work focuses on are queerness and food, so I sought her opinions on both.
HZ: Here is a question from someone who says, “My sister is bi or pan, but has received pushback for using each of those terms in different situations. People say things like, ‘Calling yourself bi is transphobic.’ She is also trans, and considers trans folk, non-binary folk, et cetera, eligible partners. They also say calling yourself pan is biphobic or bi erasure; bi is all inclusive. Now she feels genuinely scared to tell anybody either of those things and really just wants to communicate, and feels like whichever one she use is going to be misunderstood and used against her. I know this is an area where the language is in flux, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts."
ALEX KETCHUM: Well, first of all, I'm sorry that your sibling has experienced pushback and hostility about the language that she's choosing to use for herself.
There's kind of a joke about the difference between bisexuality and pansexuality is your feeling about the colour yellow, because of the flags, there's a lot of similarities in terms of the flags, and as someone who identifies both as bisexual and pansexual, I understand the difficulty in of navigating these terms.
Terminology within queer communities is ever shifting. And also the way that people relate to certain terminology can be really personal. There's not actually just one straightforward answer of how there's a difference between bisexuality and pansexuality. For listeners who are unaware of kind of the debate around this: some folks say that bisexuality implies that there's only two genders and is really reliant on the gender binary, and that it erases non-binary identities. And some people would argue that bisexuality isn't speaking about love or attraction towards men and women, but rather same and different. So that becomes the more trans-inclusive understanding of bisexuality. Pansexuality is about attraction to people of all genders. Sometimes people will also come up with a differentiation, that one is attraction to both and kind of an inclusive of same and different, that would be bisexuality; and pansexuality sometimes is defined of attraction regardless of gender.
So there are subtle differences here, but not everyone totally believes in all these differences, because they can be so particular to different subcommunities within the queer community and specific to time and geography. And I think it's important to use the terminology that you personally are comfortable with. For me, I feel more aligned with bisexual because it was the term that first made sense to me. I hadn't even heard of pansexual when I was 17 years old. Sometimes we have these personal ties to the phrases. I think that's why a lot of people are also drawn to the word ‘queer’ instead, because of its umbrella category. But there's also feelings of reluctance to use that term as well, due to its history. So I'm sorry that your sibling is experiencing pushback, and I hope she feels supported in using the terms that work for her.
HZ: Do you have experience of people having similar responses to you, where they are disagreeing with you about the terminology that you prefer for yourself? And if so, what is your rejoinder to them?
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, I don't feel like I've ever had someone call me out for saying bisexual or pansexual probably, because I always am like, "I use both! And I also use queer!"
HZ: Oh, so get ahead of it?
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, exactly. But I also sometimes see more of the pushback actually in internet spaces and the comments on Instagram and how people are reacting to that. The place where I actually see more of the pushback, and not just in internet spaces, is just about the existence of bisexuals at all.
HZ: Oh no.
ALEX KETCHUM: So I feel the biphobia is really the more place where I see hostility, both from straight communities, but also queer communities. So that can be the place where there's more of the like, "oh, bi women are traitors" – I don't wanna repeat all of these terrible stereotypes and stuff, I don't wanna like reingrain them. But there, there's a lot of harmful discourse about bi people of all genders and who have different stereotypes.
So that's where I see it more. And so that's why maybe also some people can be drawn to the term pansexual, because if they're not feeling as aligned with the term bisexual, maybe it's not as triggering when they see all of this biphobic rhetoric online, perhaps. That could also be another thing.
But, you know, terms are flexible. We use them in a lot of ways – as this podcast is always talking about, language is complicated and identity is complicated, shifting understandings of gender and sexuality make language complicated... So I think we'll continue to see a flux around these terms.
HZ: Several years ago now I made that episode Two Or More about seventy years of the word ‘bisexual’; as a term, it has never had an easy time.
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, it's constantly contested and even though bisexuals are the largest category of queer people, like within the LGBTQ community.
HZ: So if you ever unionise, then –
ALEX KETCHUM: – maybe we'll have more of a vote.
HZ: Okay. Maybe that's the move.
ALEX KETCHUM: We shall see. Yeah.
HZ: I know for a lot of you, your happy place is the podcast Home Cooking, hosted by Hrishikesh Hirway and Samin Nosrat – is Hrishi the alumsionist who has made the most appearances on the show so far? Well, here he notches up another one:
HZ: Hrishi, Samin, welcome back to the Allusionist.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Thank you so much. So happy to be back.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Thank you so much for having us. Except I'm sure you're gonna feel sorry about it in just a moment.
HZ: Well, it'll probably be my fault, because last time you were on, Samin, I angered you. So anything could happen.
SAMIN NOSRAT: I don't, I've completely blocked it out.
HZ: Oh okay. That's probably because of the rage. It just removed the blood supply to your head eventually.
HZ: Listen to Bonus 2021 to hear how I made Samin sputter with my salad preferences, and they’re both on the Food Quiz episode.
HZ: I've had this question from Jake, who says, "I have a need for a word. I choose to limit the amount of meat I eat for environmental reasons. I am not a vegetarian. I am seeking to reduce consumption, rather than end any consumption. Specifically, I don't buy meat at the grocery store, except for special occasions. If I go out to eat, I sometimes order meat. Looking around at how I as an individual can contribute least to climate change is to drive less and eat less meat, that is what I'm going for. We might say that no word is needed, because eating less meat is still cruel or still too much of a burden to the planet, so I should just go full-time vegetarian. But in the meantime, what do we call people who save meat eating for special occasions because of environmental reasons? Ecotarian?"
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I like 'ecotarian'.
HZ: You answered your own question, Jake, but then you probably have to explain what it is to someone where if, if you said, "I'm ecotarian," they'd be like, “Okay, well – I'll cook you chicken?”
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: that you can't get around the question really anyway. There's always a conversation when you ask somebody about their diet. You know, people can say, "I'm a carnivore, but also I can't eat this thing, or I can't eat that," you know? So I think ecotarian works because you're gonna have to have follow-up questions regardless.
SAMIN NOSRAT: You guys, there is already a word for this!
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: What's that?
SAMIN NOSRAT: It's called the flexitarian.
HZ: Yeah, but then how do you indicate whether or not you are flexing that day?
SAMIN NOSRAT: Look up the definition: “A flexitarian diet, also called a semi-vegetarian diet, is one that is centred on plant foods with limited or occasional inclusion of meat, usually for flexibility and sustainability reasons.”
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Interesting.
SAMIN NOSRAT: It's literally everything he's asking for.
HZ: Sometimes the gift is already in front of us, and it just took Samin Nosrat wrap it up and put it on the table.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I'd suggest an alternative to flexitarian, because he's really close to being a vegetarian, he's just there; I would say he's an edgetarian.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Edgetarian! Hahaha.
HZ: I was doing what Jake is doing for some time –
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Emailing podcasts?
HZ: Absolutely not, never would. But for a long time, I was eating meat once or twice a month, and now I don't eat meat. But, for that time, a small lie was quite useful, because I wanted to eat the meat that I chose, which was basically when I went for dim sum, and not the meat that people would cook for me because they don’t know how to cook vegetables. So my solution is lies.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Yeah, I like that. I like that solution a lot.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: How about carniv-either-or?
HZ: Ohhh.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Oh no.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I tried. Tried. So my wife Lindsay is vegan, and because of that I eat mostly vegan just by default, and I support all of the reasons why she is a vegan. And so I tried floating this term to her, which is that I'm vegan 80% of the time. I'm 80% vegan: I'm vega. Which is 80% of the word vegan… and she had a similar reaction to this stunned silence of appreciation that I'm getting from the two of you.
HZ: Yeah, that's what this is. Yeah.
SAMIN NOSRAT: We're both shaking our heads vigorously.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: In agreement, right?
HZ: With appreciation and approval. Yes, the breeze of approval has caught our heads.
SAMIN NOSRAT: You're not a vega.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: OK.
HZ: Could be a vean.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Vean, I like.
HZ: I remember when I met Hrishi, actually, you did say that you were vegetarian, except you did make an exception pretty much every Friday to eat a fried chicken sandwich.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Oh, that's right! Fried chicken Fridays.
SAMIN NOSRAT: I was gonna say fried chicken Fridays. He's a vegan who eats fried chicken sandwiches. Like that's literally the main thing I've seen you break it for.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yes. And the advent of the vegetarian fried chicken sandwich was just the greatest thing for me.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Anytime I've tried to stick to anything, it has failed so miserably. Like so miserably.
HZ: Like what? When you were like, “I'm just gonna drink blood”?
SAMIN NOSRAT: Yeah, like when first I decided I was gonna be a vampire, then I decided I was going to be a daytime vegan – and I told press about it.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Oh, that's right – the Jonathan Safran Foer vegan until sunset?
SAMIN NOSRAT: I was like, oh yeah, I'll just be a daytime vegan and nighttime – and it's not even that I want to eat meat. It's more that I just wanna drink milk and eat cheese.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I thought you were really gonna go back to, “It's just that I wanna drink blood.”
HZ: And eat blood cheese.
SAMIN NOSRAT: Blood cheese, totally.
HZ: Maybe ‘flexitarian’ is the perfect word for you, Samin, but just 'cause it allows doing whatever you didn't do yesterday.
SAMIN NOSRAT: It's true! Or like, is there just like indecisivarian?
HZ: I don't know.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: We'll come back to it.
HZ: Or will we?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Or will we! I'm holding onto carniv-either-or, even if no one else is.
HZ: ‘Flexitarian’ was the American Dialect Society’s pick for most useful word of the year in 2003, so hold on tight for carniv-either-or to top the list any year now. I also put the same question from Jake to Alex Ketchum.
ALEX KETCHUM: I feel like flexitarian speaks a little bit more to the intentionality rather than the folks who call themselves omnivores, because the folks who call themselves omnivores – at least my own personal connotation with it, maybe this isn't the case for others – is that there's a bit more meat on the menu than I would assume of a flexitarian.
HZ: Jake says: “The reason I want a word is because I am a teacher, I talk about my meat consumption or non-consumption more than I assume I would at work, were I not trying to model responsible behaviour.”
ALEX KETCHUM: I know you want a single term, but it's of course complicated. Wait, yeah, this is what I'm gonna say for everything!
HZ: Well, I did give you the questions where there wasn't a one word answer.
ALEX KETCHUM: But Alicia Kennedy has this book No Meat Required and is unpacking ideas of vegetarianism and vegan identities and how a lot of times this has become like an identity that we put on ourselves, partly just because we need to signal to people what we can and can't eat, but also the terms themselves have flexibility.
So in the 1970s and a lot of kind of countercultural spaces, especially white dominated countercultural spaces, ‘vegetarian’ included fish. So even our understandings of vegetarian shifts over time. I don't think there's exactly like one single term to speak to a reduced meat diet, but a lot of times people might say, “I primarily eat plant-based meals,” right? There's just a way to kind of indicate to others, and it's not saying like, the emphasis on primarily doing something, you're indicating that that is where you're putting the emphasis. And I kind of like that framing because it decenters meat. So it's not that I'm eating less meat, it's that I'm eating more plants, and so that can shift some of that framing. But there's not a single term, though people, you know, are playful with terms; and maybe you will turn ecotarian, why not? And then there's also lots of different types of – there's lacto ovo vegetarians, you know, there's a lot of variety there. So, yeah, I think you can use a phrase like plant-based or plant-forward.
HZ: I think there's reasonable pushback on the term vegan being used by people who aren't vegan, because eating a fully plant-based meal sometimes does not make you a vegan. But then, in food labelling, they can put 'plant-based' on something that contains animal products. And that really messed with my head. That makes it a non-useful label, to me.
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, I think also part of that distinction too has to do with, if you know Carol J. Adams’s work about the sexual politics of meat and how meat is so tied to gender roles and that like masculinity and meat consumption are so intertwined, and that some folks also would rather use ‘plant-based’ as a term over ‘vegan’, even if there is this like miscategorizing on labelling a product, because veganism can be linked to this idea of femininity, or is tied to like not being strong or not these toxic masculinity ideals. And so we kind of see this shift like in terms of marketing towards that.
HZ: So it's sort of like Diet Coke versus Coke Zero.
ALEX KETCHUM: Exactly. Yeah.
HZ: I also find it a little complicated because I don't eat mammal or bird meat, but I do occasionally eat fish. But I tend to only really want to eat the fish when I choose it, occasionally.
ALEX KETCHUM: So you don't like the term pescatarian.
HZ: I think it's more like, I feel like a liar when I say vegetarian, beut I don’t want to tell people I’m pescatarian because I don’t really want them to feed me fish. Which is not very principled of me.
ALEX KETCHUM: You know, in this conversation I'm thinking about the parallels with the bisexual-pansexual thing, because I also eat fish and have my whole life, I was raised eating fish, only fish, 'cause my mom lived on a commune that had that kind of 1970s vegetarian ideal where vegetarianism included fish. So that's how I grew up.
And so I'm just always say, "I'm pescatarian and vegetarian," you know, just like I do the bisexual-pansexual, I feel like I just kind of allow for that openness and maybe that has assuaged a feeling of like hiding something. But it is this interesting thing with our food preferences, how there is this way where it almost feels like we're confessing to something. It's not just a way of communicating what we need to eat and how we can kind of form community over eating. But there is almost this like, I don't wanna take this too theoretically, but kind of Foucaultian nature of the confessional in a similar manner to how we have around our sexuality.
So, yeah, I hadn't previously thought of that parallel until this conversation in terms of, I don't want to undermine the experience of coming out because that is a different kind of experience, but I do see some parallels in how you're constantly coming out as like your own sexual orientation and gender identity, but also how you eat and these other choices and how that characterises us in different ways and like our bodies… I'm going too far out with this from the original question!
HZ: That was Alex Ketchum; her latest books are How to Organize Inclusive Events and Conferences, and Queers at the Table: An Illustrated Guide to Queer Food (with Recipes). And because Alex never rests, you can preorder her next book Digital Queers and High Tech Gays: The History of LGBTQ+ Cyber Activism.
Lauren Gawne is a linguist, author of the book Gesture: a Slim Guide, and the cohost of Lingthusiasm podcast which has new zines, and new merch featuring meat clarinet artwork, which is both more and less obscene than what you might be imagining. And hear her recent Allusionist appearance in the Lingthusionist episode.
Kory Stamper is a writer and lexicographer. Her latest book is True Color: the Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color, from Azure to Zinc; you can hear her talk about it in the Hues episode; and hear her back in the Authority episode talking about what it is to be a lexicographer, the subject of her excellent book Word By Word.
Hrishikesh Hirway and Samin Nosrat cohost the world’s most charming podcast Home Cooking, and they both do many other things; Hrishi’s podcasts include Song Exploder and he’s a musician with a new album out, In The Last Hour of Light - get it! Samin’s latest book is Good Things, it will make you want to feed yourself and your favourite people, and it’s great for those who eat mostly plants.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
fadge, noun, Australia/Aotearoa New Zealand: a loose pack of wool containing less than a bale.
Try using ‘fadge’ in an email today. That’s fadge, F A D G E, fadge.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com and the experimental podcast Neutrino Watch.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, whereby I will talk affectionately and persuasively about your product or thing, get in touch with them at multitudeshows.com/ads.
You can listen to or read every episode and get more information about the topics and people therein, see photos of the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, check out listings for events coming up – I think we’re going to have a little social meetup in Vancouver mid-September – and become a member of the Allusioverse to help keep this independent podcast going and get the ad free version, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
