KATIE MACK: If you watch something like Star Trek, there's always words like the tachyon beam and the inertial compensators, and you get these really multisyllabic constructions, and that's how you know that you're not supposed to understand it, and you're supposed to just file it away as ‘complicated thing’. So I think that's the way that we signal to people that you're supposed to just take that as a given because it's technical and difficult and you're not going to get it, and therefore you don't have to fact check it in your head. I'm a physicist, so I'm not a good audience for that sort of thing; I'm clearly not objective. But I also feel like sometimes that that kind of thing can scare people away from real science. When scientific jargon stands in for "That's too complicated, I can't possibly understand it," I think that makes people think, "Oh, science is too complicated, I can't possibly understand it.”
HZ: I assume some of the motivation for this is them not wanting to break the fantasy world that they've created. So they come up with these words that seem strange enough to fit in with a different world, but still identifiable enough that the audience - and the actors - can assimilate them sufficiently without being stopped in their tracks. And I wonder, if science fiction used terms as simple as ‘black hole’ and ‘big bang’, the audience just wouldn't accept it: it might seem like the writers had failed to be imaginative, and the real terms are just too banal to seem realistic in a science fiction context.
KATIE MACK: Yeah. I wonder about that. Like if they just call it something like the heat death or the big bang or something, I think people would be like, "Eh."
HZ: Bit basic.
KATIE MACK: Yeah. Yeah.

"Accent is identity; it's a way of encoding and signaling almost completely at an unconscious level for most people, who they feel like they are, who they want to be seen as, what group they feel like they belong to."

The first time I heard of graphology - the analysis of someone’s character through their handwriting - I was aged about 10, and I had a charity shop book called The Complete Book of Fortune. I read with interest and mild cynicism about how the layout of your moles reveals your personality, about divination from egg whites you’ve left out for 24 hours, and that it’s a portent of terrible times ahead if you dream of a walnut. The graphology chapter of this book didn’t amount to much more than “If your line of handwriting slopes upwards, you’re an optimist! If it slopes down, you’re a pessimist. If it goes up and down and up and down, you’re unstable.”

So that was my first exposure to graphology. My second exposure was in tabloids every so often, when they’d wheel out a graphologist to analyse the handwriting of serial killers. “It was a dead giveaway when he signed his name Ted Bundy.”

Let me warn you, listeners: when you are revealed to be a serial killer, whatever your handwriting is like, it will be interpreted to have been riddled with warning signs.

So, yeah, I didn’t take graphology all that seriously.

ADAM BRAND: It's known as a pseudo science.

HZ: And perhaps nor did Adam Brand, who has been a graphologist for twenty years.

When we get a bit lost up among the big numbers, rather than using a specific like quadrillion or quattuorvigintillion (that has 75 zeros behind it!), we might use a word that suggests a really big number, such as zillion, jillion or squillion. These are known as indefinite hyperbolic numerals.

STEPHEN CHRISOMALIS: Indefinite hyperbolic numerals are words that have the form of numerals; they act like numerals; but as their name would suggest, they're indefinite. They don't have a definite numerical reference, and they're hyperbolic. In other words, whatever they are, however big they are, they're really big.

CAETANO GALINDO: It's really difficult not to like the things you have translated, and it's not just an ego thing. The point is you had to put things apart. You had to really understand everything. Translators have no alibis. You have to at least convince yourself that you have a working explanation to everything and you have a theory to understand everything, because you cannot just skip it and say, “Oh, later we'll see how it goes.” You have to propose something; you have to offer a solution. And when you get to that level of reading, you come to love everything; you come to see what was there and that you as a reader sometimes was not able to see.
HZ: And then I guess if you're a translator you have to ignore your own ego, because if you've done your job well, you're almost invisible.
CAETANO GALINDO: Yeah! Yeah. And that may sound like some sort of a curse to some people; but to me that's probably the best part of it, because I don't have to worry about how I am being perceived or how I am coming through as a speaker or as a writer. When I write these days, I tend to be really tired of my style, my choices, my words, my sentences. But when I'm writing other people's books, they've made the tough choices for me. I only have to clothe their books or their stories with a new language, with the new prose.

There’s something I trip over regularly in the Allusionist.

Dates.

It comes up often in this show: “A bit of ancient Greek happened in 350 BC! A word came into English via French in 700 AD!”

That’s 350 Before Christ, 700 Anno Domini, the year of the lord (the lord also being Christ, in case you were expecting it to be the New Zealand singer Lorde).

The thing that makes me pause: Christ… he’s not my guy. I’m not religious at all. So every time I label a year BC or AD, I think, “Am I really allowed to, having not opted into the religion whose figurehead’s putative birthdate is the fulcrum for this whole system?”

And I know some of you will be screaming at me, “Helen! Just substitute BC and AD with BCE and ACE, Before Common Era and After Common Era! If it’s good enough for the United Nations, it’s good enough for you!”

But here’s my issue with BCE and ACE: they are still referring to the same Christ-based dating practices. They might not be using Christy language, but the language it is using aligns commonality with Christianity.

I’m not trying to erase the contributions of Jesus Christ to the culture in which I live. I merely want to know how he came to be so integral to our system of dating.

LEE: Hello, my name is Lee. I'm a genderqueer trans masculine gay guy and it's time for me to talk to Helen Zaltzman about my genitals.
So there's actually a lot of different contexts in which genitals come up, and there's different language for each of them. For me as someone who was assigned female at birth and has a vagina has a uterus but mostly passes as male, there's a lot of different things that go into what I'm choosing to call my genitals.

LORELEI: I sometimes like to refer to my genitalia as “anachronistic”, which seems to fit perfectly. I have a friend who refers to my genitalia as “the factory-installed equipment.”

HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: My name is Hrishikesh Hirway. I'm the host of Song Exploder. Helen, I can't stand the word ‘namaste’.
HZ: Really? Why?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Well, first of all most of the time when you hear it in America it's not even pronounced correctly. People say nama.... I can't even do it. Na Mas Te. NAMASTE!
HZ: What are we supposed to say?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Namaste. Namaste. The T has a little T-H. Namaste.
HZ: I’m going to have to practise in my own time. That is a difficult consonant to achieve. I’ll practise by myself; it’ll be less humiliating than with you here, with pity in your eyes.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: That’s not pity, it’s judgement.
HZ: OK. It's mispronounced. That's the first problem.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: All the time. And then it gets used. You know, I live in LA, which is probably the global hub of McDonald's yoga; and every time it's said you know with this sanctimonious kind of, "Oh, namaste," and I'm like, first, if you're going to use it in this kind of faux profound way, please learn to say it correctly.
HZ: Do you attend yoga classes ever?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I do sometimes go because in things both linguistic and physical, I'm not very flexible.
HZ: So it's trying in two ways.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah.
HZ: And what happens if someone says it to you?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: I stay silent. I'm like, do you do you notice that the only Indian person in this room is not saying it?

EMMA BRIANT: The category of migrant is one that embraces a lot of different groups. This is simply just somebody who is moving one place to another, and that might be internally within a country, or it might be between countries.
HZ: What does 'immigrant' mean?
EMMA BRIANT: 'Immigrant' is relational. So it's somebody who's coming into the country. So when the British media is talking about immigrants, they're talking about people coming to Britain. When the French media is talking about immigrants, they're talking people coming into France. ‘Emigrant’ means people leaving, so people who migrate from Britain to France or to anywhere are emigrating to that country. So it is just about the direction of travel basically.
HZ: And what’s the distinction between ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘refugee’?
EMMA BRIANT: A refugee is somebody who, according to the Refugee Convention, is fleeing war and persecution, torture, this kind of thing; political oppression. And that is a category they have to prove they are in that position. So somebody who is trying to become a refugee is called an asylum seeker. So they haven't had their case heard yet. And once their application has been heard,  if it's worked successfully and it's not rejected, then they become a refugee, and they are entitled to be treated the same as any other citizen in the country, so they should be entitled to everything another citizen would get. These kinds of categories get used very indistinctly, and I think there's an awful lot of misunderstanding.

HZ: How do you make the words tormenting your brain behave themselves?

JANE GREGORY: It’s basically stripping it of any meaning at all, reducing it back down to a series of letters or a string of letters that don’t actually have to mean anything. If you have a random thought that doesn’t mean anything to you, eg the sky is orange, you don’t latch onto that and think, “What’s wrong with me, thinking the sky is orange?” or “The sky must be orange, because I had that thought”. But if you had the thought, “I’m a failure,” when that pops into your mind, for some reason you pay attention to that as if that’s true.

With the term ‘sanctuary cities’ in the news a lot in the past few weeks, our Radiotopian sibling 99% Invisible just made a two-parter tracing the origins of the modern sanctuary movement, which provides refuge for the persecuted, the vulnerable and, lately in particular, undocumented immigrants. So I wanted to dig further into the word ‘sanctuary’, which derives from the Latin ‘sanctuarium’, a sacred or private space. Its root was the Latin word ‘sanctus’, meaning ‘holy’.

That there is a religious element in ‘sanctuary’ isn’t surprising: buildings of worship provide protection and safety during the modern sanctuary movement, as they have throughout history.

Since the mid-16th century, the word ‘sanctuary’ has carried the more general sense of a place of refuge, not necessarily a religious one.

But before then, the word had a meaning that is a pretty big contrast to the modern sanctuary movement: for at least a thousand years in England, until James I abolished it in 1623, sanctuary was not for people fleeing injustice, but for people fleeing justice.

JOHN JENKINS: If you'd committed a crime, if you could get yourself to a place of religious significance - a church, a cathedral, even things like a monastery or an abbot's house or in some respects, even just land that belonged to the church or was near to it, then you were able to effectively evade justice for a period of time.