RACHEL BOTSMAN: I always know when a word is having its moment in the sun when big conferences, it becomes the theme at the conference, or I get slightly nervous when you start to see it as the tag line in really big commercial brands because it's a word that's starting to become co-opted and commercialised, because people go, "Oh, it's resonating with a lot of people.” It's not a brand. Trust isn't a brand that you should use. It's a social glue that when it breaks down, it has really huge consequences to our lives. When terms become so broad that they lose their meaning, they become completely diluted. And this is actually my fear around trust right now, is that it's become the word of the moment that is being used in so many different contexts that are we actually diluting something? One of the most important words we have in the human language, that is so fundamental to our relationships, that are we taking the meaning and importance out of it by its overuse?
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 moreAllusionist 94. Harsh Realm - transcript
MEGAN JASPER: I was the lucky recipient of a telephone call from the New York Times in the early 90s when they were writing a huge piece on Seattle, and they wanted to focus on the grunge lexicon. They wanted terms and phrases and words that we all used in the music scene; words and phrases that you would only know if you are part of the Seattle music scene.
HZ: On 15 November 1992, the New York Times printed an article entitled ‘Grunge - A Success Story’, about how grunge had become the latest big thing - ‘from subculture to mass culture’, as the article put it. In the preceding couple of years, the Seattle music scene had been co-opted by the mainstream, and by this point, record labels were putting stickers on album covers saying ‘Seattle’; just a couple of weeks before the NYT article, Marc Jacobs caused a stir in the fashion industry when he showed his grunge collection for Perry Ellis, after which he both won an award and was fired; Vogue printed a ‘Grunge & Glory’ fashion spread; and Kurt Cobain was photographed wearing a T-shirt printed with ‘grunge is dead’, in case you were wondering whether everyone was pleased with all these developments. And chasing the zeitgeist before it dipped below the horizon, there was the New York Times.
“When did grunge become grunge?’ the first paragraph went. “How did a five-letter word meaning dirt, filth, trash become synonymous with a musical genre, a fashion statement, a pop phenomenon?”
Immediately, you notice an error: ‘grunge’ is a six-letter word, not a five-letter word. But that’s just your warm-up error; don’t peak too early.
Read on, and there’s a sidebar entitled “Lexicon of Grunge: Breaking the Code”, “coming soon to a high school or mall near you”. And there followed a list of grunge slang terms.
bloated, big bag of bloatation – drunk
bound-and-hagged – staying home on Friday or Saturday night
harsh realm – bummer
plats – platform shoes
score – great
Not familiar with any of these terms? No. Nor was anybody.
MEGAN JASPER: What they didn't realize is that no such language really existed. And so I decided to have a little bit of fun with it.
Read moreAllusionist 93. Gossip - transcript
HZ: A thousand or so years ago, the word ‘gossip’ meant something quite different: a family member. The word broke down to ‘god sibb’, like a godsibling, although then the ‘sibb’ wasn’t necessarily a sibling, was more general, could refer to anyone you were related to. And over the next few hundred years, more specifically, gossips were the close female family and friends who would attend to a woman during labour; she would be sequestered and maybe half a dozen gossips would gather in the room to take care of the mother and help deliver the baby and witness the birth for the purposes of the baby’s baptism - at which these gossips, godsibbs, would be the child’s sponsors. And during these confinements, the women would keep each other company and talk. So you can see how the word would evolve to mean the kind of confidential chat you’d have with someone you’re close to, but by the mid-16th century the word had taken on a bit of a disapproving tone, that the talk was trivial and maybe scurrilous - and female. And these associations persist to this day.
LAINEY LUI: One of my goals as a gossip crusader is to end the pejorative way it's presented in culture, that it's a thing that hens do all around, pecking at each other. It's highly feminized, which is why it's not taken as seriously, when in fact the research shows that we all gossip: it's a human way of communicating.
Read moreAllusionist 92. To Err Is Human - transcript
SUSIE DENT: There never has been a golden age when everything was as it should be ever. Even though we tend to think that English is now at its most dumbed down, always; I think every generation has thought that.
Read more2018 Extra Special QUIZ! - interactive transcript
For a bit of fun to celebrate Radiotopia’s 2018 fundraiser, this episode is a wordy quiz for you to play along with as you listen.
Read moreAllusionist 91. Bonus 2018 - transcript
Today’s episode is the annual bonus Allusionist, featuring outtakes from some of this year’s guests saying things that were not necessarily related to the topic of the original episode, or even related to language at all, but I thought, “Hmm! Interesting!” and filed them away until THIS MOMENT.
This is not a typical episode of the Allusionist, so if this is your first time here, welcome! And do try a few different episodes of the show to get a picture. This year there have been episodes about your names, and superhero names; about how swearing can be good for your health, and so can novels; about tattoos, and typing champions; about how the drive to survive sent the Welsh language across an ocean, and the Scots language to hide at home; and many more. Thanks so much for spending time with me over 2018.
Read moreAllusionist 90. Dear Santa - transcript
JIM GLAUB: To be honest, these letters have been coming in as long as I've lived in that Chelsea apartment. And even before that, the gentleman that lived before us had been getting the letters, only about four or five a year. And then they had told me that the guys before them had been getting the letters.
HZ: This is Jim Glaub. He and his husband Dylan Parker were living in an apartment on West 22nd St in Manhattan. And every year, these letters would arrive there, addressed... to Santa.
Read moreAllusionist 89. WPM - transcript
The Guinness world record for typing speed was held by the late Barbara Blackburn. There are two kinds of typing contests: sprints, and marathons. And Barbara was a champion of both: During minute-long speed tests, Barbara could type up to 170 wpm on typewriter or, on a computer, 212 words per minute.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: 212 words per minute
HZ: And in endurance tests she could type 150wpm for 50 minutes.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: 150 words per minute, for 50 minutes
HZ: To show off her world record-breaking achievement, in 1985 Barbara was invited onto the David Letterman show, to race against the fastest typist on Letterman show staff - also called Barbara. But Barbara Blackburn sabotaged the contest.
Read moreAllusionist 88. Name Changers - transcript
I changed my name because my parents spelled it wrong.
Why did I change my name? I didn't like it!
I have legally changed my name twice now, first and last. My parents tell this cute story about choosing my name the night before I was born. But as I was growing up, it was one of the most common names for female dogs.
I found out when I was about 12 that I was actually named for an actress that my dad had had a crush on when he was a kid, so I thought that was a bit weird and I didn't really want to hang on to that.
When I was born my parents could not agree on a name for me, and on their last day in the hospital after I was born they were watching the news and there was a missing children's report on the TV with a little girl named Ashleigh, and I was named after her.
Choosing a new name allowed me to drop a lot of the old baggage with the old identity without feeling as though I were betraying it.
Read moreAllusionist 87. Name v Law - transcript
JÓN GNARR: I had a daughter in 92, and she was named Camilla after her grandmother, it was Camilla with a C, spelled with a C. And so when I got the confirmation note from the National Registry, where they tell you that your child is now named something in the registry, they had spelled her name with a K. It's confirmed that the child Kamilla Jónssdóttir, blah blah blah. And I called them, because it was spelled with a C, and I just wanted to tell them it was a misunderstanding, my daughter's name is spelled with a C and she said yeah, wait, and I waited on the line and then she came back and she said no, it's no misunderstanding: C has been banned in the Icelandic alphabet.
HZ: C has been banned??
JÓN GNARR: C was banned. Yeah.
Allusionist 86. Name Therapy - transcript
DUANA TAHA: People's issues with the names they choose for their children, and even their own names, are almost never resolved. People don't talk about them. It's the word that you use the most often and the soonest to describe yourself, and yet nobody's really ever talked about how it makes me feel like this.
Read moreAllusionist 85. Skin Story - transcript
HZ: Thirteen or so years ago, I met a friend at a pub, and she had someone with her who had a tattoo on her elbow of the word ‘cuticles,’. An unusual word to see as a tattoo - unlikely to be the name of a loved one or a birthplace or something. And also it wasn’t just the word ‘cuticles’, it was ‘cuticles’ followed by a comma.
SHELLEY JACKSON: With a piece of punctuation attached, you can really tell that it must be part of something else.
HZ: She was part of something else: The Skin Project, a story, 2095 words long, and each word tattooed on a person.
Read moreAllusionist 84. Trammels - transcript
ROSS SUTHERLAND: We're taught from a young age to be good sports at losing games. Sportsmanship as a concept is all about being a good loser. And yet we're terrified of the concept of losing art. It's a horrible thing to try and to put yourself out there and for it to fail. So if you can reframe it as a game then all the better.
HZ: Because if you fail again you've just failed at the game and not at art entirely.
ROSS SUTHERLAND: Yeah, exactly. You fail at the game, but then you can play again. it's less of a referendum on your own self-worth if you just lose a game, because we play games all the time and so we're very comfortable with our odds. Whereas I feel when it when it comes to art the odds feel a little bit more important, and they shouldn't.
Read moreAllusionist 81. Shark Week - transcript
HZ: There used to be a term ‘goatmilker’, it was a bird that was believed to suck milk from goats at night, but it was also slang for sex workers, and therefore slang for vulvas.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Wow.
HZ: Licentious men were known as ‘goatmilkers’, because they were frequenting these sex workers in the 17th century when this word was around.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Again, not enough poetry in that for me.
HZ: Too vulgar for you?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yes, for my delicate sensibilities.
